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VII. " " Vol.11. " 



LIFE AND MANNERS ; 



FROM 



THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 



BY 



THOMAS DE QUINCEY 



BOSTON: 
TICKNOR, REED, AND FIELDS 

MDCCCLI. 



C 



H 



» SSI 



v JUttX^Ck^ r 









TBURSTOX, rORRT, AND EMERSON, PRINTERS. 






7 



"7 



CONTENTS. 

I. EARLY DAYS 9 

II. LONDON 49 

III. IRELAND 90 

IV. THE IRISH BEBELLION 116 

V. PREMATURE MANHOOD 150 

VI. TRAVELLING . . . .. . . .167 

VII. MY BROTHER 1ST 

VIII. OXFORD 225 

IX. " 247 

X. / 283 

XI. GERMAN LITERATURE 312 



LIFE AND MANNERS. 



CHAPTER I. 

EARLY DAYS. 



I was born in a situation the most favorable to hap- 
piness of any, perhaps, which can exist ; of parents 
neither too high nor too low; not very rich, which is 
too likely to be a snare ; not poor, which is oftentimes a 
greater. I might spend many pages, like the Emperor 
Marcus Aurelius, in telling over the bead-roll of all the 
advantages which belonged to my situation, or in making 
my separate acknowledgment to the several persons from 
whom I drew the means of improving these advantages, 
so far as I did improve them. And, in some instances, 
it would cost me a dissertation to prove that the accidents 
of my position in life, which I regard as advantages, 
really were such in a philosophic sense. Let the reader 
feel no alarm. Such a dissertation, and such a rehearsal, 
would be more painful to myself than they could be 
wearisome to him. For these things change their aspects 
according to the station from which they happen to be 
surveyed ; in prospect they are simply great blessings to 
be enjoyed ; in retrospect, great pledges to be redeemed. 



10 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

Viewed in front, they form a golden dowery of hope ; 
viewed in the rear, a burthen of responsibility from which 
an apprehensive conscience will have reason too often to 
shrink in sadness. 

My father was a plain and unpretending man, who 
began life with what is considered in England (or was 
considered) a small fortune, viz., six thousand pounds. 
I once heard a young banker in Liverpool, with the 
general assent of those who heard him, fix upon that 
identical sum of six thousand pounds as exemplifying, 
for the standard of English life, the absolute ideal of 
a dangerous inheritance; just too little, as he said, to 
promise comfort or real independence, and yet large 
enough to operate as a temptation to indolence. Six 
thousand pounds, therefore, he considered in the light 
of a snare to a young man, and almost as a malicious 
bequest. On the other hand, Ludlow, the regicide, who, 
as the son of an English baronet, and as ex-commander- 
in-chief of the Parliament cavalry, &c, knew well what 
belonged to elegant and luxurious life, records it as 
his opinion of an Englishman who had sheltered him 
from state blood-hounds, that in possessing an annual 
revenue of <£100, he enjoyed all the solid comforts of 
this life, — neither himself rapacious of his neighbor's 
goods, nor rich enough in his own person to offer a 
mark to the rapacity of others. This was in 1660, when 
the expenses of living in England were not so widely 
removed, aquatis cequandis, from the common average 
of this day ; both scales being far below that of the long 
war-period which followed the French Revolution. 

"What in one man, however, is wise moderation, may 
happen in another, differently circumstanced, to be posi- 
tive injustice, or sordid inaptitude to aspire. At, or about, 
his 26th year, my father married ; and it is probable that 



EARLY DAYS. 11 

the pretensions of my mother, which were, in some re- 
spects, more elevated than his own, might concur with 
his own activity of mind to break the temptation, if for 
him any temptation had ever existed, to a life of obscure 
repose. This small fortune, in a country so expensive 
as England, did not promise to his w T ife the style of 
living to which she had been accustomed. Every man 
wishes for his wife what, on his own account, he might 
readily dispense with. Partly, therefore, with a view to 
what he would consider as her reasonable expectations, 
he entered into trade as an Irish and a West Indian 
merchant. But there is no doubt that, even apart from 
consideration for his wife, the general tone of feeling 
in English society, which stamps a kind of disreputable- 
ness on the avowed intention to do nothing, would, at any 
rate, have sent him into some mode of active life. In 
saying that he was a West Indian merchant, I must be 
careful to acquit his memory of any connection with the 
slave trade, by which so many fortunes were made at 
that era in Liverpool, Glasgow, &c. Whatever may be 
thought of slavery itself as modified in the British colo- 
nies, or of the remedies attempted for that evil by modern 
statesmanship ; of the kidnapping, murdering slave-trade* 
there cannot be two opinions ; and my father, though 
connected with the West Indian trade in all honorable 
branches, was so far from lending himself even by a 



* The confusion of slavery with the slave-trade, at one time was 
universal. But now-a-days it is supposed by many to be a superfluous 
care, if one is sedulous to mark the distinction in a pointed way. Yet 
it was but last year that, happening to converse with a very respectable 
and well-iuformed surgeon in the north, I found him assuming, as a 
matter of course, that emancipation, &c. had been the express and im- 
mediate object of Wilberforce, Clarkson, &c, in their long crusade: nor 
could I satisfy him that, however ultimately contemplating that result, 
they had even found it necessary to disown it as a present object. 



12 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

passive concurrence to this most memorable abomina- 
tion, that he was one of those conscientious protesters 
who, throughout England, for a long period after the 
first publication* of Clarkson's famous Essay, and the 
evidence delivered before the House of Commons, strictly 
abstained from the use of sugar in his own family. 

Meantime, as respected some paramount feelings of my 
after life, I drew from both parents, and the several 
aspects of their characters, great advantages. Each, in a 
different sense, was a high-toned moralist ; and my mother 
had a separate advantage, as compared with persons of 
that rank, in high-bred and polished manners. Every man 
has his own standard of a summum bonnm, as exemplified 
in the arrangements of life. For my own part, without 
troubling others as to my peculiar likings and dislikings, 
in points which illustrate nothing, — I shall acknowledge 
frankly, that, in every scheme of social happiness I could 
ever frame, the spirit of manners entered largely as an 
indispensable element. The Italian ideal of their own 
language, as a spoken one, is expressed thus — Lingua 
Toscana in bocca Romana : there must be two elements 
— the Florentine choice of words, and the Florentine 
idiom, concurring with the Roman pronunciation. Paro- 
dying this, I would express my conception of a society 
(suppose a household) entirely well constituted, and fitted 
to yield the greatest amount of lasting pleasure, in these 
terms, — The morals of the middle classes of England, 

* Writing where I have no books, like Salmasius, I make all my 
references to a forty years' course of reading, by memory. In every 
case, except where I make a formal citation marked as such, this is to 
be understood. My chronology on this particular subject is rather 
uncertain ; Clarkson's Essay, (originally Latin,) published, I think, in 
1787, Anthony Benezet's book, Granville Sharpe's Trial of the Slave 
question in a court of justice — these were the openings : then came 
Wilberfore, Clarkson's second work, the Evidence before Parliament. 



EARLY DAYS. 13 

combined with the manners of the highest ; or, more 
pointedly, by the morals of the gentry, with the manners 
of the nobility. Manners more noble, or more polished 
than the manners of the English nobility, I cannot imagine ; 
nor, on the other hand, a morality which is built less upon 
the mere amiableness of quick sensibilities, or more 
entirely upon massy substructions of principle and con- 
science, than the morality of the British middle classes. 
Rooks, literature, institutions of police, facts innumerable, 
within my own experience, and open to all the world, can 
be brought to bear with a world of evidence upon this 
subject. I am aware of the anger which I shall rouse in 
many minds by both doctrines ; but I am not disposed to 
concede any point of what to me appears the truth, either 
to general misanthropy and cynicism, to political preju- 
dices, or to anti-national feeling. Such notices as have 
occurred to me on these subjects, within my personal 
experience, I shall bring forward as they happen to arise. 
Let them be met and opposed as they shall deserve. 
Morals arc sturdy things, and not so much liable to erro- 
neous valuation. But the fugitive, volatile, imponderable 
essences which concern the spirit of manners, are really 
not susceptible of any just or intelligible treatment by 
mere words and distinctions, unless, in so far as they are 
assisted and interpreted by continual illustrations from 
absolute experience. Meantime, the reader will not accuse 
me of an aristocratic feeling, now that he understands 
what it is that I admire in the aristocracy, and with what 
limitation. It is my infirmity, if the reader chooses so to 
consider it, that I cannot frame an ideal of society, happily 
constituted, without including, as a foremost element, and 
possibly in an undue balance, certain refinements in the 
spirit of manners, which, to many excellent people, hardly 
exist at all as objects of conscious regard. In the same 



14 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

spirit, but without acknowledging the least effeminacy, 
even in the excess to which I carry it, far better, and more 
cheerfully I could dispense with some part of the down- 
right necessaries of life, than with certain circumstances 
of elegance and propriety in the daily habits of using 
them. 

With these feelings, and, if the reader chooses, these 
infirmities, I was placed in a singularly fortunate position. 
My father, as I have said, had no brilliant qualities : but 
the moral integrity which I have attributed to his class, 
was so peculiarly expressed in him, that in my early life, 
and for many years after his death, I occasionally met 
strangers who would say to me, almost in the same form 
of words, (so essential was their harmony as to the thing,) 
1 Sir, I knew your father: he was the most upright man I 
ever met with in my life.' Nobody, that I remember, 
praised him under the notion of a clever man, or a man of 
talent. Yet that he was so in some subordinate sense, is 
probable, both from his success as a man of business, and 
more unequivocally in other ways. He wrote a book : 
and though not a book of much pretension in its subject, 
yet in those days to have written a book at all, was cred- 
itable to a man's activity of mind, and to his strength of 
character, in acting without a precedent. In the execution, 
this book was really respectable. As to the subject, it was 
a sketch of a tour in the midland counties of England, in 
one octavo volume. The plan upon which it was con- 
structed, made it tolerably miscellaneous ; for throughout 
the tour a double purpose was kept before the reader — 
viz. of attention to the Fine Arts, in a general account of 
the paintings and statues in the principal mansions lying 
near the line of his route ; and, secondly, of attention to 
the mechanic arts, as displayed in the canals, manufacto- 
ries, &c. then rising everywhere into activity, and quick- 



EARLY DAYS. 15 

ened into a hastier development, by Arkwrighl and the 
Peels, in one direction, and in another, by Brindiey, the 
engineer, under the patronage of the Duke of Bridgewater. 
This Duke, by the way, was guided by an accident of life, 
concurring with his own disposition, and his gloomy sensi- 
bility to the wrong, or the indignity he had suffered, into 
those ascetic habits, which left his income disposable for 
canals, and for the patronizing of Brindiey. He had been 
jilted : and in consequence he became a woman-hater — 
a misogynist — as bitter as Euripides. On seeing a woman 
approaching, he would l quarter,' and zig-zag to any 
extent, rather than face her. Being, by this accident of his 
life, released from the expenses of a ducal establishment, 
he was the better able to create that immense wealth 
which afterwards yielded vast estates to the then Marquis 
of Stafford, to the Earl of Bridgewater, &c. In its outline 
and conception, my father's book was exactly what is so 
much wanted at this time for the whole island, and was 
some years ago pointed out by the Quarterly Review as a 
desideratum not easily supplied — viz. a guide to the 
whole wealth of art, above ground and below, which, in 
this land of ours, every square mile, crowds upon the 
notice of strangers. In the style of its execution, and the 
alternate treatment of the mechanic arts and the fine arts, 
the work resembles the well-known tours of Arthur Young, 
which blended rural industry with picture galleries ; ex- 
cepting only, that in my father's I remember no politics, 
perhaps because it was written before the French Revolu- 
tion. Partly, perhaps, it might be a cause, and partly an 
effect, of this attention paid by my father to the galleries 
of art in the aristocratic mansions ; that throughout the 
principal rooms of his own house, there were scattered a 
small collection of paintings by old Italian masters. I 
mention this fact, not as a circumstance of exclusive ele- 



16 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

gance belonging to my father's establishment, but for the 
very opposite reason, as belonging very generally to my 
father's class. Many of them possessed collections much 
finer than his ; and I remember that two of the few visits, 
on which, when a child, I was allowed to accompany my 
mother, were expressly to see a picture-gallery, belonging 
to a merchant, not much wealthier than my father. In 
reality, I cannot say anything more to the honor of this 
mercantile class than the fact, that, being a wealthy class, 
and living with a free and liberal expenditure, they applied 
a very considerable proportion of this expenditure to intel- 
lectual pleasures — to pictures, very commonly, as I have 
mentioned — to liberal society — and, in a large measure, 
to books. Yet, whilst the whole body of the meichants in 
this place lived in a style which, for its mixed liberality 
and elegance, resembled that of Venetian merchants, there 
w r as very little about themselves or their establishments of 
external splendor, that is, in any features which met the 
public eye. According to the manners of their country, 
the internal economy of their establishments erred by too 
much profusion. They had too many servants ; and those 
servants were maintained in a style of luxury and comfort, 
not often matched in the mansions of the nobility. Yet, 
on the other hand, none of these were kept for show or 
ostentation ; and, accordingly, it was not very common to 
find servants in livery. The women had their fixed and 
appropriate duties ; but the men acted in mixed capacities. 
Carriages were not very commonly kept ; even where from 
one to two thousand a year might be spent. There was in 
this town a good deal of society ; somewhat better in an 
intellectual sense than such as is merely literary ; for that 
is, of all society, the feeblest. From the clergyman, the 
medical body, and the merchants, was supported a Philo- 
sophical Society, who regularly published their transactions. 



EARLY DAYS. 17 

And some of the members were of a rank in science to 
correspond with D'Alembert, and others of the leading 
Parisian wits and literati. Yet so little even here did mere 
outside splendor and imposing names avail against the 
palpable evidence of things — against mother-wit and nat- 
ural robustness of intellect, that the particular physician 
who chiefly corresponded with the Encyclopedists, spite 
of his BufTon, his Diderot, his D'Alembert, by whom, in 
fact, he swore, and whose frothy letters he kept like amu- 
lets in his pocket-book, ranked in general esteem as no 
better than one of the sons of the feeble ; and the treason 
went so far as sometimes to comprehend his correspond- 
ents — the great men of the Academy — in the same 
derogatory estimate ; and, in reality, their printed letters 
are evidences enough that no great wrong was done them 
— being generally vapid, and as much inferior to Gray's 
letters, recently made popular by Mason's life throughout 
England, as these again are, in spirit, and naivete — not 
to Cowper's only, but to many an unknown woman's in 
every night of the year — little thought of perhaps by her 
correspondent, and destined pretty certainly to oblivion. 
One word only I shall add, descriptive of my father's 
library ; because in describing his, I describe those of all 
his class. It was very extensive ; comprehending the 
whole general literature both of England and Scotland 
for the preceding generation. It was impossible to name 
a book in the classes of history, biography, voyages and 
travels, belles-lettres, or popular divinity, which was 
wanting. And to these was added a pretty complete body 
of local tours, (such as Pennant's,) and topography; 
many of which last, being illustrated extensively with 
plates, were fixed for ever in the recollections of children. 
But one thing was noticeable, — all the books were Eng- 
lish. There was no affectation cither in my father or 



18 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

mother, of decorating their tables with foreign books, not 
better than thousands of corresponding books in their 
mother idiom ; or of painfully spelling out the contents, 
obscurely and doubtfully, as must always happen when 
people have not a familiar oral acquaintance with the 
whole force and value of a language. How often, upon 
the table of a modern litterateur, languid, perhaps, and 
dyspeptic, so as to be in no condition for enjoying any- 
thing, do we see books lying in six or eight different 
languages, not one of which he has mastered in a degree 
putting him really and unaffectedly in possession of its 
idiomatic wealth, or really, and seriously, in a condition 
to seek his unaffected pleasures in that language. Besides, 
what reason has any man looking only for enjoyment, to 
import exotic luxuries, until he has a little exhausted 
those which are native to the soil ? Are Abana and 
Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better indeed than all the 
waters of Israel ? True it is, there are different reasons 
for learning a language ; and with some I have here 
nothing to do. But where the luxuries of literature are 
the things sought, I can understand why a Dane should 
learn English ; because his native literature is not wide, 
nor very original ; and the best modern writers of his 
country have a trick of writing in German, with a view to 
a larger audience. Even a Spaniard, or a Portuguese, 
might, with much good sense, acquire at some pains the 
English or the German ; because his own literature, with 
a few splendid jewels, is not mounted in all departments 
equally well. But is it for those who have fed on the gifts 
of Ceres, to discard them for acorns ? This is to reverse 
the old mythological history of human progress. Now, 
for example, one of the richest departments in English 
literature happens to be its drama, from the reign of 
Elizabeth, to the Parliamentary war : such another exhi- 



EARLY DAYS. 19 

bition of human life under a most picturesque form of 
manners, and a stage of society so rich in original portrai- 
ture, and in strength of character, has not existed else- 
where, nor is ever likely to revolve upon ourselves. The 
tragic drama of Greece is the only section of literature 
having a corresponding interest or value. Well ; few 
readers are now much acquainted with this section of lite- 
rature ; even the powerful sketches of Beaumont and 
Fletcher, who, in their comic delineations, approach to 
Shakspeare, lie covered with dust ; and yet, whilst these 
things are, some twenty years ago we all saw the arid 
sterilities of Alfieri promoted to a place in every young 
lady's boudoir. It is true that, in this particular instance, 
the undue honor paid to this lifeless painter of life, and 
this undramatic dramatist, was owing to the accident of 
his memoirs having been just then published ; and true 
also it is, that the insipid dramas, unable to sustain them- 
selves, have long since sunk back into oblivion. But other 
writers, not better, are still succeeding ; as must ever be 
the case, with readers not sufficiently masters of a lan- 
guage, to bring the true pretensions of a work to any test 
of feeling, and who are for ever mistaking for some pleas- 
ure conferred by the writer, what is in fact the pleasure * 
naturally attached to the sense of a difficulty overcome. 

Not only were there in my father's library no books 
except English ; but even amongst those there were none 
connected with the Black Letter literature ; none in fact, 
of any kind, which presupposed study and labor, for their 
enjoyment. It was a poor library, on this account, for a 
scholar or a man of research. Its use and purpose was 
mere enjoyment, instant amusement, without effort or 



* There can he no douht that this particular mistake has heen a chief 
cause of the vastly exaggerated appreciation of much that is mediocre in 
Greek literature. 



i 



20 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

affectation ; but still liberal and intellectual. Living in the 
country, as most of his order did, my father could not 
look to a theatre for his evening pleasures — or to any 
public resort. To a theatre he went only when lie took 
his family ; and that might be once in five years. Books, 
gardens on a large scale, and a green-house, were the 
means generally relied on for daily pleasure. The last, 
in particular, was so commonly attached to a house, that 
it formed a principal room in the country-house, with the 
modest name of The Farm, in which I passed my in- 
fancy ; it was the principal room, as to dimensions, in a 
spacious house which my father built for himself; and 
was not wanting, on some scale or other, in any one 
house of those which I most visited when a school-boy. I 
may finish my portrait of my father and his class, by say- 
ing that Cowper was the poet whom they generally most 
valued ; that Dr. Johnson, who had only just ceased to be 
a living author, was looked up to with considerable rev- 
erence and interest, upon various mixed feelings ; partly 
for his courage, for his sturdy and uncomplying morality, 
according to his views, for his general love of truth ; and 
(as usual) for his diction, amongst all who loved the 
stately, the processional, the artificial, and even the in- 
flated, — with the usual dissent, on the part of all who 
were more open to the natural graces of mother English, 
and idiomatic liveliness. Finally, I may add, that there 
was too little music in those houses in those days ; and 
that the reverence paid to learning, to scholastic erudition, 
I mean, was disproportionate and excessive. Not having 
had the advantages of a college education themselves, my 
father and his class looked up with too much admiration 
to those who had ; ascribing to them, with a natural mod- 
esty, a superiority greatly beyond the fact ; and, not 
allowing themselves to see, that business, and the practice 






EARLY DAYS. 21 

of life, had given to themselves countervailing advan- 
tages ; nor discerning, that too often the scholar had be- 
come dull and comatose over his books; whilst the activity 
of trade, and the strife of practical business, had sharp- 
ened their own judgments, set an edge upon their under- 
standings, and increased the mobility of their general 
powers. As to the general esteem for Cowper, that was 
inevitable : his picture of an English rural fire-side, with 
its long winter evening, the sofa wheeled round to the fire, 
the massy draperies depending from the windows, the tea- 
table with its ' bubbling and loud hissing urn,' the news- 
paper and the long debate, — Pitt and Fox ruling the 
senate, and Erskine the bar, — all this held up a mere 
mirror to that particular period, and their own particular 
houses ; whilst the character of his rural scenery was 
exactly the same in Cowper's experience of England, as 
in their own. So that, in all these features, they recog- 
nised their countryman and their contemporary, who saw 
things from the same station as themselves ; whilst his 
moral denunciations upon all great public questions then 
afloat, were cast in the very same mould of conscientious 
principle as their own. In saying that, I mean upon all 
questions where the moral bearings of the case, (as in the 
slave-trade, lettres de cachet, Sfc.) were open to no doubt. 
They all agreed in being very solicitous, in a point which 
evidently gives no concern at all to a Frenchman, viz., 
that in her public and foreign acts, their country should be 
in the right. In other respects, upon politics, there were 
great differences of opinion, especially throughout the 
American war, until the French Revolution began to 
change its first features of promise. After that, a great 
monotony of opinion prevailed for many years amongst 
all of that class. 

To pass from my father's house to myself, living in the 



22 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

country, I was naturally first laid hold of by rural appear- 
ances or incidents. The very earliest feelings that I 
recall of a powerful character, were connected with some 
clusters of crocuses in the garden. Next, I felt the pas- 
sion of grief, in a profound degree, for the death of a 
beautiful bird, a king-fisher, which had been taken up in 
the garden with a fractured wing. This occurred before I 
was two years of age. Next, I felt no grief at all, but 
awe the most enduring, and a dawning sense of the in- 
finite, which brooded over me, more or less, after that 
time, upon the death of a sister, who must have been one 
year older than myself; I, that is to say, a few months 
more than two, she than three. At this time I was afflicted 
with ague, and suffered under it for two consecutive years. 
Arsenic was then never administered. The remedy 
chiefly employed with me was riding on horseback. I 
was placed before a man on a horse, whose white color 
and great size I still remember. But of all early remem- 
brances, in distinctness none rivals one connected with an 
illumination which took place on the King's recovery from 
his first attack of lunacy. At the date of that illumina- 
tion I must have been two and a half years old. It marks 
the general exultation of the people in that event, that my 
father, living in the country, should have illuminated his 
house at all ; for, of course, there was nobody to see it. 
Next, in the order of my remembrances, comes the death 
of another sister, which affected me equally with grief 
and awe ; so that, after this time, if not before, the stand- 
ing scenery of my thoughts was drawn from objects vast 
and dim — the grave, and the mysteries which lie beyond 
it. [My sister had died of hydrocephalus. It is well 
known that this complaint (which is now treated in its 
early stages much more successfully than at that time) 
disposes the intellect to a premature development. Ac- 



EABLY DAYS. 23 

cordingly, my sister was noticed as a prodigy ; but her 
superiority did not, as usual, lie in vivacity and quickness ; 
the effect showed itself in an extraordinary expansion of 
the understanding ; her grasp of intellect was large and 
comprehensive, in a degree which astonished people in a 
child of eight years old ; otherwise she had the usual 
slowness of a melancholic child. Her head, it was deter- 
mined, should be opened : this was done by a surgeon of 
some celebrity, Mr. Charles White, once a pupil of John 
Hunter's, who made innumerable measurements of skulls, 
especially African, and wrote a large book to prove that 
the human being was connected by a regular series of 
links with the brute ; i. e. that the transition from the Af- 
rican skull to that of the ape, in some species or other, 
was not more abrupt than from the European to the Af- 
rican. Mr. White, after the operation, declared often that 
the child's brain was ; the most beautiful ' he had ever 
seen.] After her death, an habitual gravity (melancholy 
I cannot call it) and sense of some awful but indefinite 
presence fell over me ; and this I never lost. Had I been 
a sickly child, it would have produced gloom. As it was, 
being tolerably healthy, I was generally happy ; and the 
effect of my everlasting commerce with the subjects of 
death and the grave, showed itself simply in this, that I 
never played, — and that my mind was peopled with sol- 
emn imagery. In saying that I never played, I must 
make two reservations : with gunpowder, as a thing that 
seemed to me incapable of being stripped of its serious 
character, I had the common boyish pleasure ; and where 
it was unavoidable to play at something, gunpowder was 
always my resource, since that was interesting to all alike. 
I also invented a sport call Troja, as late as my 13th year. 
Else, and with these two exceptions, I may truly say that 
I never played in my life. In general, the inference from 



24 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

such a fact would be, that a boy must be suffering in 
health who could so remarkably contradict the evident 
purposes of nature. But with me the case arose naturally 
enough out of my own solitariness, and the position I oc- 
cupied in my own family. Living always in the country, 
I had no companion but an elder brother ; and he, being 
five years older, at a time of life when five years was a 
groat matter in either life, naturally enough disdained me. 
I again, on the same principle, neglected my next brother. 
Thus I was left to myself : no creature had I to converse 
with, (generally speaking,) unless I could, on Lord Shafts- 
bury's plan, and in his phrase, become a ' self-dialogist : ' 
and a self-dialogist I did become ; perhaps the earliest 
that has existed. Subjects enough I had for solitary mus- 
ing in the great thoughts which had been awakened within 
me, by the reiteration and measured succession of deaths 
in the family. The ancients believed in a fascination 
called nympholepsy. It was that species of demoniac 
enthusiasm or possession incident to one who had accident- 
ally seen the nymphs. I, in some sense, was a nympho- 
lept : I had caught too early and too profound a glimpse 
of certain dread realities. Solitude, which I sought by 
choice, might be said to seek me by necessity ; for com- 
panions I had none of my own age ; I was not allowed 
ever to go near the servants. And books, which I soon 
passionately loved, aided all these tendencies. They were 
ratified by what followed, with respect to my father's last 
illness and death. 

It was during my infancy, that a house and suitable 
grounds, &c, were commenced by my father on a scale 
rather suited to the fortune which, by all accounts, he was 
rapidly approaching, than that which he actually possessed. 
This house, elegant but plain, and having nothing remark- 
able about it but the doors and windows of the superior 



EARLY DAYS. 25 

rooms, which were made of mahogany, sent as a present 
from a foreign correspondent, was brought into a habitable 
state about my fifth year. Thither we removed : and the 
earliest event, I connect with it, was — standing with 
others on a summer evening listening for the sound of 
wheels. My mother had been summoned by an express 
to meet my father, who had broken a blood vessel. ' What 
did that mean ? ' It meant that a person was very ill and 
feeble. ■ And would he die ? ' Perhaps he would ; most 
people in cold climates did. The next incident I remem- 
ber, was many months afterwards ; my father had, in the 
interval, made extensive tours to warmer climates ; — he 
had visited Lisbon, next the Madeiras ; and finally St. 
Kitt's, all to no purpose. He was now returning home to 
die. For some weeks I remember being about him as he 
lay on a sofa surrounded with West India productions dis- 
played for my amusement. I was aware by something 
peculiar in the look and aspect of the house, a depression 
visible on all faces, and a quiet tread, that some speedy 
catastrophe was approaching : and at length one morning 
I saw signs which sufficiently indicated that it was then at 
hand. Dead silence reigned in the house : whispers only 
audible ; and I saw all the women of the family weeping. 
Soon after, all of us, being then four, able to understand 
such a scene, were carried into the bed-room in which my 
father was at that moment dying. Whether he had asked 
for us, I know not : if so, his senses had left him before 
we came. He was delirious, and talked at intervals — 
always on the same subject. He was ascending a moun- 
tain, and he had met with some great obstacle, which to 
him was insurmountable without help. This he called for 
from various people, naming them, and complaining of 
their desertion. The person who had gathered us together, 
raised my father's hand and laid it upon my head. We 
3 



26 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

left the room ; and in less than two minutes we heard it 
announced that all was over. 

My father's death made little or no change in the house- 
hold economy, except that my mother ever afterwards 
kept a carriage ; which my father, in effect, exacted upon 
his death-bed. 

My father's death occurred in 1792. His funeral, at 
which I and my elder brother were chief mourners, was 
the first I had attended. Then first it was that the solemn 
farewell of the English burial-service, ' Dust to dust, ashes 
to ashes,' and the great eloquence of St. Paul in that 
matchless chapter of his epistle to the Corinthians, fell 
upon my ear ; and, concurring with my whole previous 
feelings, for ever fixed that vast subject upon my mind. 

I was then nearly seven years old. In the next four 
years, during which we continued to live at the same 
house, nothing remarkable occurred, except the visit of a 
most eccentric young woman, who, about ten years after- 
wards, made a great noise in the world, and drew the eyes 
of all England upon herself, by her unprincipled conduct 
in an affair affecting the life of two young Scottish gentle- 
men. At this time she was about twenty-two, with a 
Grecian contour of face, elegant in person, and highly 
accomplished. In particular, she astonished every person 
by her performances on the organ, and by her powers of 
disputation. But these she applied entirely to attacks 
upon Christianity ; for she openly professed infidelity ; and 
at my mother's table, she certainly proved more than a 
match for all the clergymen of the neighboring towns, 
some of whom (as the most intellectual persons of that 
neighborhood) were daily invited to meet her. It was a 
mere accident which had introduced her to my mother's 
house. Happening to hear from my sister's governess 
that she and her pupil were going on a visit to an old Cath- 



EARLY DAYS. 27 

olic family in the county of Durham, (the family of Mr. 
Swinburne, the traveller in Spain, &c.,) she, whose Cath- 
olic education, in a French convent, had introduced her 
extensively to the knowledge of Catholic families in Eng- 
land, and who had herself an invitation to the same place, 
upon that wrote to offer the use of her carriage to convey 
all three to Mr. Swinburne's. This naturally drew forth 
an invitation from my mother, and she came. She must 
certainly, by what I saw of her ten years after, at the 
Oxford assizes, have been at this time a most striking 
creature ; and her eloquence was astonishing. Even at 
that early age, she was already parted from her husband. 
On the imperial of her carriage, and elsewhere, she 

described herself as the Hon. Antonina Dashwood L -. 

But, in fact, as only the illegitimate daughter of Lord le 

D , she was not entitled to that designation. She had, 

however, received a large fortune from her father, not less 
than forty thousand pounds. At a very early age, she had 
married a young Oxonian, distinguished for nothing but a 
very handsome person : and from him she had speedily 
separated, on the agreement of dividing the fortune. My 
mother, agitated between the necessities of hospitality, on 
the one hand, and her horror, on the other hand, to meet 
a woman, for the first time in her life, openly professing 
infidelity, at length fell ill ; and this hastened Mrs. L.'s 
departure ; not, however, before I, a child of eight years 
old, had seen things which nobody else suspected. She 
admitted me to her bed-room ; and more than once her 
footman, ' a man of figure,' according to the London 
term for such persons, upon frivolous pretexts, came to 
her dressing-room, which adjoined ; more than once also 
I saw him snatch her hand, and kiss it — whilst she, on 
her part, blushed, and looked round in alarm. What this 
meant, I had not the least guess ; but having always been 



28 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

accustomed to see my mother keep her servants at a dis- 
tance the most awful, I judged that it must be wrong, and 
I mentioned it to nobody. Afterwards, however, when the 
Oxford affair came on, I recollected the incident, and all 
became plain. Yet, when that also had passed over, and 
was forgotten, the lady published a book containing her 
views upon government ; which, from many quarters, I 
heard of as no common performance. But, at that early 
period, in 1794, her talents, her beauty efface and figure, 
her fine execution on the organ, her scenical skill in sus- 
taining through a short scene some grand dramatic char- 
acter, like that of Lady Macbeth, her powers of disputation, 
and, finally, her application of them to so unfeminine a 
purpose as that of undisguised assaults upon Christianity, 
combined to leave an impression, as of some great 
enchantress or Medea, upon all who had been admitted to 
witness her displays. 

Perhaps I may as well, at this point, anticipate the 
sequel of her history. In 1804, at the Lent Assizes for 
the county of Oxford, she appeared as principal witness 
against two brothers, L-ck-t G-d-n, and L-d-n G-d-n, 
on a capital charge of having forcibly carried her off from 
her own house in London, and afterwards of having, at 
some place in Oxfordshire, by collusion with each other 
and by terror, enabled one of the brothers to offer the last 
violence to her person. The accounts published at the 
time by the newspapers of the whole transaction, were of 
a nature to conciliate the public sympathy altogether to 
the prisoners ; and the general belief accorded with what 
was, no doubt, the truth — that the lady had been driven 
into a false accusation by the urgent remonstrances of her 
friends, joined, in this instance, by her husband, although 
legally separated from her, all of whom were willing to 
believe that advantage had been taken of her little ac- 



EARLY DAYS. 29 

quaintance with English manners. I was present at the 
trial ; it began at eight o'clock in the morning, and went 
on, for some hours, occupied with preparatory evidence. 
At length Mrs. L. herself was summoned, and, with no 
little anxiety, I awaited the entrance of my early friend. 
Her beauty was yet visible, though affected greatly by the 
humiliating circumstances of her situation, and (as one 
would willingly hope) by the conflicts of her own con- 
science. However, she was not long exposed to the 
searching gaze of the court, and the trying embarrass- 
ments of her situation. A single question brought the 
whole investigation to an abrupt close. Mrs. L. had been 
sworn, of course. After a few questions, she was sud- 
denly asked whether she believed in the Christian religion ? 
Her answer was brief and peremptory, without distinction 
or circumlocution — No. Or, perhaps, not in God? 
Again she replied, sans phrase, No. Upon this the Judge 
interfered, and declared that he could not permit the trial 
to proceed. The jury had heard what the witness said ; 
she only could give evidence upon the capital part of the 
charge ; and she had openly incapacitated herself before 
the whole court. The jury instantly acquitted the prison- 
ers. I left my name at Mrs. L.'s lodgings in the course of 
the day, but her servant assured me that she was too much 
agitated to see anybody till the evening. At the hour 
assigned I called again. It was dusk, and the mob had 
assembled. At the moment I came up to the door, a lady 
was issuing, muffled up, and in some measure disguised. 
It was Mrs. L. At the corner of an adjacent street a post- 
chaise was drawn up. Towards this, under the protection 
of the attorney who had managed her case, she made her 
way as eagerly as possible. Before she could reach it, 
however, she was detected ; a savage howl was raised, and 
a rush made to seize her. Fortunately a body of gowns- 



30 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

men delivered her, put her rapidly into the carriage, and 
then joining the mob in their hootings, sent off the horses 
at a gallop. Such was the mode of her exit from Oxford. 
The accused gentlemen, one of whom has since published 
interesting memoirs, had been students in Oxford, and had 
many friends in that place. 

Four years after my father's death, it began to be per- 
ceived that there w r as no purpose to be answered in any 
longer keeping up an expensive establishment. A head- 
gardener, besides laborers equal perhaps to two more, 
were required for the grounds and gardens. And no 
motive existed any longer for being near a great trading 
town, so long after the commercial connection with it had 
ceased. Bath seemed, on all accounts, the natural station 
for a person in my mother's situation ; and, thither, accord- 
ingly, she went. I, who from the year 1793 had been 
placed under the tuition of one of my guardians, remained 
some months longer under his care. I was then trans- 
ferred to Bath. During this interval, however, the sale of 
the house and grounds took place. It may illustrate the 
subject of guardianship, and the ordinary execution of its 
duties, to mention the result. The year 1796 was in itself 
a year of great depression, and every way unfavorable to 
such a transaction. However, the sale was settled. The 
night, for which it was fixed, turned out remarkably wet ; 
no attempt was made to postpone the sale, and it pro- 
ceeded. Originally the house and grounds had cost nearly 
c£6000. I have heard that only one offer was made, viz : 
of .£2500. Be that as it may, for the sum of <£*2500 
it was sold ; and I have been often assured that by waiting 
a few years, four times that sum might have been obtained 
with ease. Meantime my guardians were all men of 
honor and integrity ; but their hands were filled with their 
own affairs. One (my tutor) was a clergyman, rector of 



EARLY DAYS. 31 

a church, and having his parish, his large family, and 
three pupils to attend. He was besides a very sedentary 
and indolent man, loving books — hating business. An- 
other was a merchant. A third was a country magistrate, 
overladen with official business : him I never so much as 
saw. Finally, the fourth was a banker in a distant county ; 
having more knowledge of the world than all the rest 
united, but too remote to interfere effectually. 

Reflecting upon the evils which befel me, and the gross 
mismanagement, under my guardians, of my small for- 
tune, and that of my brothers and sisters, it has often 
occurred to me that so important an office, which, from 
the time of Demosthenes, has been ruinously adminis- 
tered, ought to be put upon a new footing, plainly guarded 
by a few obvious provisions. As under the Roman laws, 
for a long period, the guardian should be made responsible 
in law, and should give security from the first for the due 
performance of his duties. But, to give him a motive for 
doing this, of course he must be paid. With the new 
obligations and liabilities will commence commensurate 
emoluments. This is merely the outline : to fill up the 
whole scheme of the office and its functions would be a 
matter of time and skill. But some great change is im- 
peratively called for: no duty in the whole compass of 
human life being so scandalously neglected as this. 

At Bath, I, and one of my younger brothers, were 
placed at the grammar school, at the head of which was 
an Etonian. The most interesting occurrence during my 
stay at this school was the sudden escape of Sir Sidney 
Smith from the prison of the Temple in Paris. The 
mode of his escape was as striking as its time was critical 
and providential. Having accidentally thrown a ball over 
the wall in playing at tennis, or some such game, Sir Sid- 
ney was surprised to observe that the ball thrown back 



32 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

was not the same. His presence of mind fortunately sug- 
gested the true interpretation. He retired, examined the 
ball, found it stuffed with letters ; and, in the same way, 
he subsequently conducted a long correspondence, and 
arranged the whole circumstances of his escape ; which, 
remarkably enough, was accomplished just eight days 
before the sailing of Napoleon with the Egyptian expe- 
dition ; so that Sir Sidney was just in time to confront, 
and utterly to defeat Napoleon in the breach of Acre. But 
for Sir Sidney, it is certain that Bonaparte would have 
overrun Syria. What would have followed from that 
event, it is difficult to say. 

Sir Sidney Smith, I must explain to readers of this 
generation, and Sir Edward Pellew, (afterwards Lord 
Exmouth,) were the two * Paladins of the first war with 
revolutionary France. These two names were never 
mentioned but in connection with some splendid and 
unequal contest. Hence the whole nation was saddened 
by the account of Sir Sidney's capture ; and this must be 
understood to make the joy of his sudden return perfectly 
intelligible. Not even a rumor of Sir Sidney's escape 
had or could have run before him ; for, his mother being 
at Bath, he had set off at the moment of reaching the 
coast of England with post horses to Bath. It was about 
dusk w r hen he arrived : the postilions were directed to 
the square in which his mother lived : in a few minutes he 
was in his mother's arms, and in twenty minutes more the 
news had flown to the remotest suburb of the city. The 
agitation of Bath on this occasion was indescribable. All 
the troops of the line then quartered in that city, and a 

* Sir Horatio Nelson being already an Admiral, was no longer looked 
to for insulated exploits of brilliant adventure: his name was now con- 
nected with larger and combined attacks, less dashing and adventurous, 
because including heavier responsibilities. 



EARLY DAYS. 33 

whole regiment of volunteers, immediately got under 
arms, and marched to the quarter in which Sir Sidney- 
lived. The small square overflowed with the soldiery : 
Sir Sidney went out, and was immediately lost to us, who 
were watching for him, in the closing ranks of the troops. 
Next morning, however, I, my younger brother, and a 
school-fellow of my own age, called formally upon the 
naval hero. Why, I know not, we were admitted with- 
out question or demur ; and I may record it as an amiable 
trait in Sir Sidney, that he received us then with great 
kindness, and subsequently expressed his interest in all 
the members of that school to w T hich he had himself 
once belonged. He was at that time slender and thin ; 
having an appearance of extenuation and emaciation, as 
though he had suffered hardships, and ill-treatment, which 
however, I do not remember to have heard. Meantime, 
his appearance, connected with his recent history, made 
him a very interesting person to women. To this hour it 
remains a mystery with me, why and how it came about, 
that in every distribution of honors, Sir Sidney Smith w T as 
overlooked. In the Mediterranean he made many ene- 
mies ; especially amongst those of his own profession ; 
who used to speak of him as far too fine a gentleman, and 
above his calling. Certain it is, that he liked better to be 
doing business on shore, as at Acre. But however that 
may have been, surely the man whose name Napoleon 
could never pronounce without vexation, must have done 
good service. And, at that time, his connection, of what- 
soever nature, with the late Queen Caroline, had not 
occurred. And altogether, to me, his case is inexplica- 
ble. About this time I first saw a person, whom after- 
wards I came to know — one who interested me much 
more, and was indeed as interesting and extraordinary a 
man as any in my time — I mean the celebrated Walking 
Stewart. 



34 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

From the Bath grammar school I was removed, in con- 
sequence of an accident, by which at first it was supposed 
that my skull had been fractured : and the able surgeon, 
Mr. Grant, who attended me, at one time talked of trepan- 
ning. This was an awful word : but I have always 
doubted whether in reality anything very serious had hap- 
pened. In fact I was always under a nervous panic for 
my head ; and certainly exaggerated my internal feelings 
without meaning to do so ; and this misled the medical 
attendants. During a long illness which succeeded, my 
mother read to me, in Hoole's translation, the whole of 
the Orlando Furioso : and from my own experience at 
that time I am disposed to think that the homeliness of 
this version is an advantage from not calling off the atten- 
tion at all from the narration to the narrator. At this time 
also I first read the Paradise Lost ; but oddly enough in 
the edition of Bentley, that great nanadioo6vjaig (or pseudo- 
restorator of the text). At the close of my illness, the head- 
master called upon my mother, as did a certain Colonel 
B., who had sons at the school, requesting, with many 
compliments to myself, that I might be suffered to remain. 
But it illustrates my mother's sincere moral severity, that 
she was shocked at my hearing compliments to my own 
merits, and was altogether disturbed at what doubtless 
these gentlemen expected to see received with maternal 
pride. She declined to let me continue at the Bath school ; 
and I went to another, in the county of Wilts, of which 
the recommendation lay in the religious character of the 
master. 

Here I had staid about a year, or not much more, when I 
received a letter from a young nobleman of my own age, 
Lord W., the son of an Irish Earl, inviting me to accom- 
pany him to Ireland for the ensuing summer and autumn. 
This invitation was repeated by his tutor ; and my mother 
after some consideration allowed me to accept it. 



EARLY DAYS. 35 

In the spring of 1800 accordingly, I went up to Eton, 
for the purpose of joining my friend. Here I several times 
visited the gardens of the Queen's villa at Frog mo re ; and, 
privileged by my young friend's introduction, I had oppor- 
tunities of seeing and hearing the Queen and all the 
Princesses ; which at that time was a novelty in my life, 
naturally a good deal prized. My friend's mother had 
been, before her marriage, Lady Louisa H.,and intimately 
known to the Royal Family, who, on her account, took a 
continual and especial notice of her son. 

On one of these occasions I had the honor of a brief 
interview with the King. Madame de Campan mentions, 
as an amusing incident in her early life, though terrific at 
the time, and overwhelming to her sense of shame, that 
not long after her establishment at Versailles, in the service 
of some one amongst the daughters of Louis XV., having 
as yet never seen the King, she was one day suddenly 
introduced to his particular notice, under the following 
circumstances : — The time was morning ; the young lady 
was not fifteen ; her spirits were as the spirits of a fawn 
in May ; her tour of duty for the day was not come, or 
was gone ; and, finding herself alone in a spacious room, 
what more reasonable thing could she do than amuse 
herself with whirling round, according to that fashion 
known to young ladies both in France and England, and 
which, in both countries, is called making cheeses, viz., 
pirouetting until the petticoat is inflated like a balloon, and 
then sinking into a curtsy. Mademoiselle was very 
solemnly rising from one of these curtsies, in the centre 
of her collapsing petticoats, when a slight noise alarmed 
her. Jealous of intruding eyes, yet not dreading more 
than a servant at worst, she turned ; and, oh heavens ! 
whom should she behold but his most Christian Majesty 
advancing upon her, with a brilliant suite of gentlemen, 



36 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

young and old, equipped for the chase, who had been all 
silent spectators of her performances. From the King to 
the last of the train, all bowed to her and all laughed 
without restraint as they passed the abashed amateur of 
cheese-making. But she, to speak Homerically, wished 
in that hour that the earth might gape and cover her con- 
fusion. Lord W. and I were about the age of Mademoi- 
selle, and not much more decorously engaged, when a turn 
brought us full in view of a royal party corning along one 
of the walks at Frogmore. We were, in fact, theorizing 
and practically commenting on the art of throwing stones. 
Boys have a peculiar contempt for female attempts in that 
way. Besides that girls fling wide of the mark, with a 
certainty that might have won the applause of Galerius,* 
there is a peculiar sling and rotary motion of the arm in 
launching a stone, which no girl ever can attain. From 
ancient practice I was somewhat of a proficient in this art, 
and was discussing the philosophy of female failures, 
illustrating my doctrines with pebbles, as the case hap- 
pened to demand ; whilst Lord W. was practising on the 
peculiar whirl of the wrist with a shilling ; when suddenly 
he turned the head of the coin towards me with a signifi- 
cant glance, and in a low voice he muttered some words, 
of which I caught c Grace of God? ' France f and Ireland? 

* ' Sir,' said that Emperor to a soldier, who had missed the target 
fifteen times in succession, 'allow me to offer my congratulations on 
the truly admirable skill you have shown in keeping clear of the mark. 
Not to have hit once in so many trials, argues the most splendid talents 
for missing.' 

t France was at that time among the royal titles, the act for altering 
the King's style and title not having then passed. As connected with 
this subject, I may here mention a project, (reported to have been can- 
vassed in Council at the time when that alteration did take place,) for 
changing the title from King to Emperor. What then occurred strik- 
ingly illustrates the general character of the British policy as to all 
external demonstrations of pomp and national pretension, and its strong 



EARLY DAYS. 37 

'-Defender of the Faith,'* and so forth. This solemn reci- 
tation of the legend of the coin was meant as a joke by 



opposition to that of France under corresponding circumstances. The 
principle of esse quam videri, and the carelessness about names when 
the thing is unaffected, generally speaking, must command praise and 
respect. Yet, considering how often the reputation of power becomes, for 
international purposes, nothing less than power itself, and that words, in 
many relations of human life, are emphatically things, and sometimes 
are so to the exclusion of the most absolute things themselves, men of 
all qualities being often governed by names ; the policy of France seems 
the wiser, viz., sefaire valoir, even at the price of ostentation. But, at 
all events, no man is entitled to exercise that extreme candor, forbear- 
ance, and spirit of ready concession in re aliena, and, above all, in re 
politicd, which, on his own account, might be altogether honorable. On 
a public (or at least on a foreign) relation, it is the duty of a good citi- 
zen to be lofty, exacting, almost insolent. And, on this principle, when 
the ancient style of the kingdom fell under revision, if — as I do not 
deny — it was advisable to retrench all obsolete pretensions as so many 
memorials of a greatness that was now extinct, and therefore, pro tanto, 
rather presumptions of weakness than of strength ; yet, on the other 
hand, all countervailing pretensions which had since arisen, and had far 
more than equiponderated the declension in that one direction, should 
have been then adopted into the titular heraldry of the nation. It was 
neither wise nor just to insult foreign nations with assumptions which 
no longer stood upon any basis of reality. And on that ground Fi'ance 
was rightly omitted. But why, when the Crown w T as thus remoulded, 
and its jewellery unset, if this one pearl were to be restored as a stolen 
ornament, why, we may ask, were not the many and gorgeous jewels, 
achieved by the national wisdom and power in later times, adopted into 
the recomposed tiara? Upon what principle did the Romans, the wisest 
among the children of the world, leave so many inscriptions as records 
of their power or their triumphs, upon columns, arches, temples, basiliccc , 
or medals ? A national act, a solemn, and deliberate act, delivered to 
history, is a more imperishable monument than any made by hands : and 
the title, as revised, which ought to have expressed a change in the do- 
minion simply as to the mode and form of its expansion, now remains 
as a confession of absolute contraction : once we had A, B, and C ; now 
we have dwindled into A and B. 

On this argument, it was urged at the time in high quarters, that the 
new recast of the Crown and Sceptre should come out of the furnace 
equably improved ; as much for what they were authorized to claim, as 
for what they were compelled to disclaim. And, as one mode of effect- 



38 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

way of discomposing my gravity at the moment of meet- 
ing the King ; Lord W. having himself lost somewhat of 



ing this, it was proposed that the King should become an Emperor. 
Some indeed alleged, that an Emperor, by its very idea, as received in 
the Chancery of Europe, implies a King paramount over vassal or tribu- 
tary Kings. But it is a sufficient answer to say, that an Emperor is a 
prince, uniting in his own person the thrones of several distinct king- 
doms : and in effect we adopt that view of the case in giving the title of 
Imperial to the Parliament, or common assembly of the three kingdoms. 
However, the title of the prince was a matter trivial in comparison of 
the title of his ditto, or extent of jurisdiction. This point admits of a 
striking illustration: in the Paradise Regained, Milton has given us, in 
close succession, three matchless pictures of civil grandeur, as exempli- 
fied in three different modes by three different stales. Availing himself 
of the brief Scriptural notice, — 'And the devil showed him all the 
kingdoms of the earth,' — he causes to pass, as in a solemn pageant 
before us, the two military empires then co-existing, of Parthia and 
Rome, and finally, (under another idea of political greatness,) the intel- 
lectual glories of Athens. From the picture of the Roman grandeur we 
extract, and beg the reader to weigh the following lines: — 

'Thence to the gates cast round thine eye, and see 
What conflux issuing forth or entering in ; 
Praetors, proconsuls, to their provinces 
Hasting, or on return in robes of state ; 
Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power ; 
Legions or cohorts, turms of horse and wings ; 
Or embassies from regions far remote, 
In various habits on the Appian road, 
Or on the Emilian ; some from farthest south, 
Syene, and where the shadow both way falls, 
Merae, Nilotic isle : and, more to west, 
The realm of Bocchus to the Blackmoor Sea ; 
From India and the Golden Chersonese, 
And utmost Indian Isle, Taprobane, 
— Dark faces with white silken turbans wreath'd ; 
From Gallia, Gades, and the British, west, 
Germans and Scythians and Sarmatians, north, 
Beyond Danubius to the Tauric pool.' 

With this superb picture, or abstraction of the Roman pomps and 
power, when ascending to their utmost altitude, confront the following 
representative sketch of a great English levee on some high solemnity, 



EARLY DAYS. 39 

the awe natural to a young person in a first situation of 
this nature, through his frequent admissions to the royal 

suppose the King's birth-day: — 'Amongst the presentations to his 
majesty, we noticed Lord O. S., the Governor-General of India, on his 
departure for Bengal ; Mr. U. Z. with an Address from the Upper 
and Lower Canadas ; Sir. L. V. on his appointment as Commander of 

the Forces in Nova Scoiia ; General Sir , on his return from the 

Burmese war [" the Golden Chersonese;"] the Commander-in-Chief of 
the Mediterranean fleet; Mr. B. Z., on his appointment to the Chief- 
Justiceship at Madras; Sir R. G., the late Attorney-General at the 
Cape of Good Hope ; General Y. X. on taking leave for the Governor- 
ship of Ceylon [" The utmost Indian ?'s/e, Taprobane ; "] Lord F. M. 
the bearer of the last despatches from head-quarters in Spain ; Col. P. 
on going out as Captain-General of the forces in New Holland; Com- 
modore St. L. on his return from a voyage of discovery towards the 
North Pole; the King of Owhyhee, attended by Chieftains from the 
other islands of that cluster ; Col. M'P. on his return from the war in 
Ashantee, upon which occasion the gallant Colonel presented the treaty 

and tribute from that country ; Admiral , on his appointment to the 

Baltic fleet ; Captain O. N. with despatches from the Red Sea, advising 
the destruction of the piratical armament and settlements in that quar- 
ter, as also in the Persian Gulf; Sir T. O.'N., the late resident in 
Nepaul, to present his report of the war in that territory, and in adja- 
cent regions — names as yet unknown in Europe; the Governor of the 
Leeward Islands, on departing for the West Indies ; various deputations, 
with petitions, addresses, &c, from islands in remote quarters of the 
globe, amongst which we distinguished those from Prince Edward Island 
in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, from the Mauritius, from Java, from the 
British settlement in Terra del Fuego, from the Christian Churches in 
the Society, Friendly, and Sandwich Islands — as well as other groups 
less known in the South Seas ; Admiral H. A., on assuming the com- 
mand of the Channel Fleet ; Major-Gen X. L. on resigning the Lieut. 
Governorship of Gibraltar ; Hon. G. F. on going out as secretary to the 
Governor of Malta, &c. &c. &c.' 

The sketch is founded upon a base of a very few years, i. e., we have, 
in one or two instances, placed in juxtaposition, as co-existences, events 
separated by a few years. But, if (like Milton's picture of the Roman 
grandeur) the abstraction had been made from a base of thirty years in 
extent, and had there been added to the picture (according to his prece- 
dent) the many and remote embassies to and from independent states, 
in all quarters of the earth ; with how many more groups, might the 
spectacle have been crowded, and especially of those who fall within 
that most picturesque delineation — 



40 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

presence. For my part I was as yet a stranger to the 

King's person. I had, indeed, seen most or all the prin- 
cesses in the way I have mentioned above ; and on several 
occasions, in the streets of Windsor, the sudden disappear- 
ance of all hats from the heads of the passengers, had 
admonished me that some royal personage or other was 
then traversing or crossing the street ; but either his 
Majesty had never been of the party, or I had failed to 
distinguish him. Now, for the first time, I was meeting 
him nearly face to face ; for, though the walk we occupied 
was not that in which the royal party were moving, it ran 
so near it, and was connected by so many cross-walks at 
short intervals, that it was a matter of necessity for us, as 
we were now observed, to go and present ourselves. What 
passed was naturally very unimportant ; and I know not 
that it would have been worth reporting at all, but for one 
reflection which, in after years, it forcibly suggested to 
me. The King, having first spoken with great kindness to 
my companion, inquiring circumstantially about his mother 

'Dark faces with white silken turbans wreathed! ' 

As it is, we have noticed hardly any places but such as lie absolutely 
within our jurisdiction. And yet, even under that limitation, how 
vastly more comprehensive is the chart of British dominion than of the 
Roman ! To this gorgeous empire, some corresponding style and title 
should have been adapted at the revision of the old title, and should yet 
be adapted ; for of this empire only it can be said, amongst all which 
have existed, not only that the sun never sets upon its territory, but 
almost, perhaps, that the sun is always rising and always setting, to 
some one in that endless succession of stations upon which the British 
flag is flying. 

Apropos of the proposed change in the King's title: Mr. Coleridge, 
on being assured that the new title of the King was to be Emperor of the 
British Islands and their dependencies, and on the coin Impcrator Bri- 
tanniarum, remarked, that, in this remanufactured form, the title might 
be said to he japanned; alluding to this fact, that amongst insular 
sovereigns, the only one known in Europe by the title of Emperor is the 
Sovereign of Japan. 



EARLY DAYS. 41 

and grandmother as persons particularly well known to 
himself, then turned his eye upon me. What passed was 
pretty nearly as follows : — My name, it seems, from what 
followed, had been communicated to him as we were 
advancing ; he did not, therefore, inquire about that. Was 
I of Eton ? was his first question. I replied that 1 was 
not, but hoped I should be. Had I a father living ? I had 
not : my father had been dead about eight years. c But 
you have a mother ? ' I had. 'And she thinks of sending 
you to Eton? ' I answered that she had expressed such 
an intention in my hearing ; but I was not sure whether 
that might not be in order to waive an argument with the 
person to whom she spoke, who happened to have been an 
Etonian. ' Oh, but all people think highly of Eton ; 
everybody praises Eton ; your mother does right to in- 
quire ; there can be no harm in that ; but the more she 
inquires, the more she will be satisfied ; that I can answer 
for.' 

Next came a question which had been suggested by my 
name. Had my family come into England with the 
Huguenots at the revocation of the Edict of Nantz ? This 
was a tender point with me : of all things I could not 
endure to be supposed of French descent ; yet it was a 
vexation I had constantly to face, as most people supposed 
that my name argued a French origin. I replied with 
some haste, 6 Please your Majesty, the family has been in 
England since the Conquest."' It is probable that I colored, 
or show T ed some mark of discomposure, with which, how- 
ever, the King was not displeased, for he smiled, and said, 
c How do you know that ? ' Here I was at a loss for a 
moment how to answer : for I was sensible that it did not 
become me to occupy the King's attention with any long 
stories or traditions about a subject so unimportant as my 
own family ; and yet it was necessary that I should say 
4 



42 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

something, unless I would be thought to have denied my 
Huguenot descent upon no reason or authority. After a 
moment's hesitation I said in effect — that a family of my 
name had certainly been a great and leading one at the 
era of the Barons' Wars ; and that I had myself seen 
many notices of this family, not only in books of heraldry, 
&c, but in the very earliest of all English books. ' And 
what book was that ? ' c " Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle 
in Verse," which I understood, from internal evidence, to 
have been written about 1280.' The King smiled again, 
and said, c I know, I know.' But what it was that he knew, 
long afterwards puzzled me to conjecture. I now imagine, 
however, that he meant to say, that he knew the book I 
referred to — a thing which at that time I thought improb- 
able, supposing the King's acquaintance with literature 
was not very extensive, nor likely to have comprehended 
any knowledge at all of the black-letter period. But in 
this belief I was greatly mistaken, as I was afterwards fully 
convinced by the best evidence from various quarters. 
That library of 120,000 volumes, which George IV. pre- 
sented to the nation, and which has since gone to swell the 
collection at the British Museum, was formed, (as I have 
been assured by several persons to whom the whole history 
of the library, and its growth from small rudiments, was 
familiarly known,) under the direct personal superintend- 
ence of George III. It was a favorite and pet creation ; 
and his care extended even to the dressing of the books in 
appropriate bindings, and (as one man told me) to their 
health ; explaining himself to mean, that in any case 
where a book was worm-eaten, or touched however slightly 
with the worm, the King was anxious to prevent the injury 
from increasing, and still more to keep it from infecting 
others by close neighborhood ; for it is supposed by many 
that such injuries spread rapidly in favorable situations. 



EARLY DAYS. 43 

One of my informants was a German bookbinder of great 
respectability, settled in London, and for many years em- 
ployed by the Admiralty as a confidential binder of 
records or journals containing secrets of office, &c. 
Through this connection he had been recommended to 
the service of his Majesty, whom he used to see continu- 
ally in the course of his attendance at Buckingham House, 
where the books were deposited. This bookbinder had, 
originally, in the way of his trade, become well acquainted 
with the money value of English books ; and that knowl- 
edge cannot be acquired without some concurrent knowl- 
edge of their subject and their kind of merit. Accordingly 
he was tolerably well qualified to estimate any man's 
attainments as a reading man ; and from him I received 
such circumstantial accounts of many conversations he 
had held with the King, evidently reported w T ith entire 
good faith and simplicity, that I cannot doubt the fact of 
his Majesty's very general acquaintance with English lite- 
rature. Not a day passed, whenever the King happened 
to be at Buckingham House, without his coming into the 
binding-room and minutely inspecting the progress of the 
binder and his allies — the gilders, toolers, &,c. From the 
outside of the book the transition was natural and pretty 
constant to its value in the scale of bibliography ; and in 
that way my informant had ascertained that the King was 
well acquainted, not only with Robert of Gloucester, but 
with all the other early chronicles, &c, published by 
Hearne, and in fact possessed that entire series which rose 
at one period to so enormous a price. From this person I 
learnt afterwards that the King prided himself especially 
upon his early folios of Shakspeare ; that is to say, not 
merely upon the excellence of the individual copies in a 
bibliographical sense, as i tall copies ' and having large 
margins, &c, but chiefly from their value in relation to 



44 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

the most authentic basis for the text of the poet. And 
thus it appears, that at least two of our Kings, Charles I. 
and George III., have made it their pride to profess a rev- 
erential esteem for Shakspeare. This bookbinder added his 
attestation to the truth (or to the generally reputed truth) 
of a story which I had heard from higher authority — viz. 
that the librarian, or, if not officially the librarian, at least 
the chief director in every thing relating to the books, was 
an illegitimate son of Frederick, Prince of Wales, (son to 
George II.,) and therefore half-brother of the King. His 
own taste and inclinations, it seemed, concurred with his 
brother's wishes in keeping him in a subordinate rank and 
an obscure station ; in which, however, he enjoyed afflu- 
ence without anxiety, or trouble, or courtly envy — and 
the luxury, which he most valued, of a superb library. He 
lived and died, I have heard, as plain Mr. Barnard. At 
one time I disbelieved this story, (which possibly may 
have been long known to the public,) on the ground that 
even George III. would not have differed so widely from 
princes in general as to leave a brother of his own, how- 
ever unaspiring, wholly undistinguished by public honors. 
But having since ascertained that a naval officer, well- 
known to my own family, and to a naval brother of my 
own in particular, by assistance rendered to him repeatedly 
when a midshipman in changing his ship, was undoubtedly 
an illegitimate son of George III., and yet that he never 
rose higher than the rank of Post Captain, though privately 
acknowledged by his father and other members of the 
Royal Family, I found the insufficiency of that objection. 
The fact is, and it does honor to the King's memory — he 
reverenced the moral feelings of his country, which arc, 
in this and in all points of domestic morals, severe and 
high-toned, [I say it in defiance of writers, such as Lord 
Byron, Mr. Hazlitt, &c, who hated alike the just and the 



EARLY TAYS. 45 

unjust pretensions of England,] in a degree absolutely 
incomprehensible to Southern Europe. He had his frail- 
ties like other children of Adam ; but he did not seek to 
court and fix the public attention upon them, after the 
fashion of Louis Quatorze, or our Charles II. There 
were living witnesses (more than one) of his aberrations 
as of theirs ; but he, with better feelings than they, did 
not choose, by placing these witnesses upon a pedestal of 
honor, surmounted by heraldic trophies, to emblazon his 
own transgressions to coming generations, and to force 
back the gaze of a remote posterity upon his own infirmi- <^Z 
ties. It was his ambition to be the father of his people in 
a sense not quite so literal. These were things, however, 
of which at that time I had not heard. 

During the whole dialogue, I did not even once remark 
that hesitation and iteration of words, generally attributed 
to George III. ; indeed, so generally, that it must often 
have existed ; but in this case, I suppose that the brevity 
of his sentences operated to deliver him from any em- 
barrassment of utterance, such as might have attended 
longer or more complex sentences, where an anxiety was 
natural to overtake the thoughts as they arose. When we 
observed that the King had paused in. his stream of ques- 
tions, which succeeded rapidly to each other, we under- 
stood it as a signal of dismissal ; and making a profound 
obeisance, we retired backwards a few steps ; his Majesty 
smiled in a very gracious manner, waved his hand towards 
us, and said something in a peculiarly kind accent which 
we did not distinctly hear ; he then turned round, and the 
whole party along with him ; which set us at liberty with- 
out impropriety to turn to the right about ourselves, and 
make our egress from the gardens. 

This incident, to me at my age, was very naturally one 
of considerable interest. But the reflection, to which I 



46 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

alluded above, as one which, even at those years, it for- 
cibly impressed upon me, suggested itself often after- 
wards, and at the moment of recording it in a journal 
which I kept, or tried to keep, at that period. It was this : 
Was it possible that much truth of a general nature, bear- 
ing upon man and social interests, could ever reach the 
ear of a King, under the etiquette of a court, and under 
that one rule which seemed singly sufficient to foreclose 
all natural avenues to truth — the rule, I mean, by which 
it is forbidden to address a question to the King. I was 
well aware, before I saw him, that in the royal presence, 
like the dead soldier in Lucan, whom the mighty en- 
chantress tortures back into a momentary life, I must 
have no voice except for answers. 



1 vox illi iinguaque tantum 



Responsura datur.' 

I was to originate nothing myself; and at my age, before 
so exalted a personage, the mere instincts of reverential 
demeanor would at any rate have dictated that rule. But 
what becomes of that man's general condition of mind in 
relation to all the great objects moving on the field of hu- 
man experience, where it is a law generally for almost all 
who approach him, that they shall confine themselves to 
replies, absolute responses, or at most to a prosecution or 
carrying forward of a proposition delivered by the pro- 
tagonist, or supreme leader of the conversation ? For it 
must be remembered that, generally speaking, the effect 
of putting no question, is to transfer into the other party's 
hands the entire originating movement of the dialogue ; 
and thus, in a musical metaphor, the great man is the sole 
modulator and determiner of the key in which the con- 
versation proceeds. It is true, that sometimes, by a little 
travelling beyond the question in your answer, you may 



EARLY DAYS. 47 

enlarge the basis, so as to bring up the new train of 
thought which you wish to introduce ; and may suggest 
fresh matter as effectually, as if you had the liberty of 
more openly guiding the conversation either by way of 
question, or by direct origination of a topic ; but this 
depends on skill to improve an opening, or vigilance to 
seize it at the instant, and, after all, much upon accident : 
to say nothing of the crime, a sort of petty treason per- 
haps, or, what is it ? if you should be detected in your 
< improvements ' and c enlargements of basis.' Freedom 
of communication, unfettered movement of thought, there 
can be none under such a ritual, which tends violently to 
a Byzantine, or even to a Chinese result of freezing, as it 
were, all natural and healthy play of the faculties under 
the petrific mace of absolute ceremonial and fixed prece- 
dent. For it will hardly be objected that the privileged 
condition of a few official Councillors and Ministers of 
State, whose hurry and oppression of thought from public 
care will rarely allow them to speak on any other subject 
than business, can be a remedy large enough for so large 
an evil. True it is, that a peculiarly frank or jovial tem- 
perament in a sovereign may do much for a season to 
thaw this punctilious reserve and ungenial constraint ; but 
that is an accident, and personal to an individual. And, 
on the other hand, to balance even this, and for the mo- 
ment, I have remarked, that, in all noble and fashionable 
society, where there happens to be a pride in sustaining 
what is deemed a good tone in conversation, it is peculiarly 
aimed at (and even artificially managed), that no lingering 
or loitering upon one theme, no protracted discussion, 
shall be allowed. And, doubtless, as regards merely the 
treatment of convivial or purely social communication of 
ideas, (which also is a great art,) this practice is right. I 
admit willingly that an uncultured brute, who is detected 



48 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

at an elegant table in the atrocity of absolute discussion or 
disputation, ought to be summarily removed by a police 
officer ; and possibly the law will warrant his being held 
to bail for one or two years, according to the enormity of 
his case. But men are not always enjoying or seeking to 
enjoy social pleasure ; they seek also, and have need to 
seek continually, both through books and men, intellectual 
growth, fresh power, fresh strength, fresh health, to keep 
themselves a-head or a-breast of this moving, surging, bil- 
lowing world of ours, in these modern times, when society, 
for reasons in part easily explained, revolves through so 
many new phases, and shifts its aspects with so much 
more velocity than in past ages. A King, especially of 
this country, needs, beyond most other men, to keep him- 
self in a continual state of communication, as it were by 
some vital and organic sympathy, with the most essential 
of these changes. And yet this punctilio of etiquette, like 
some vicious forms of law, or technical fictions grown too 
narrow for the age, which will not allow of cases coming 
before the Court in a shape, desired alike by the plaintiff 
and the defendant, is so framed as to defeat equally the 
wishes of a prince disposed to gather knowledge wherever 
he can find it, and of those who may be best fitted to give 
it. 

However, to leave dissertation behind me, and to re- 
sume the thread of my narrative, an incident, which about 
this period impressed me far more profoundly and more 
durably than my first introduction to a royal presence, was 
my first visit to London. 



CHAPTER II. 

LONDON. 

It was a most heavenly day in May of this year, (1800,) 
when I first beheld and first entered this mighty wilder- 
ness, as to me it was, the city — no! not the city, but the 
nation — of London. Often have I since then, at dis- 
tances of two and three hundred miles or more from this 
colossal emporium of men, wealth, arts, and intellectual 
power, felt the sublime expression of her enormous magni- 
tude in one simple form of ordinary occurrence, viz. in the 
vast droves of cattle, suppose upon the great north roads, 
all with their heads directed to London, and expound- 
ing the size of the attracting body, by the force of its attrac- 
tive power, as measured by the never-ending succession 
of the droves, and the remoteness from the capital of the 
lines upon which they were moving. A suction so pow- 
erful, felt along radii so vast, and a consciousness at the 
same time, that upon other radii still more vast, both by 
land and by sea, the same suction is operating night and 
day, summer and winter, and hurrying for ever into one 
centre the infinite means needed for her infinite purposes, 
and the endless tributes to the skill or to the luxury of her 
endless population, crowds the imagination with a pomp 
to which there is nothing corresponding upon this planet, 
either amongst the things that have been, or the things that 



50 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

are, except in ancient Rome.* We, upon this occasion, 
were in an open carriage ; and, chiefly (as I imagine) to 



* Ancient Rome: — Vast, however, as the London is of this day, I am 
persuaded that it is far below the Rome of the Caesars. It has long 
been a settled opinion amongst scholars, that the computations of Lip- 
sius, on this point, were prodigiously overcharged ; and formerly I shared 
in that belief. But a closer study of the question, and a laborious colla- 
tion of the different data, (for any single record, independently consid- 
ered, can here establish nothing,) have satisfied me that Lipsius was 
nearer the truth than his critics ; and that the Roman population of every 
class, slaves, aliens, people of the suburbs, included, lay between five 
and six millions: in which case the London of 1833, which counts more 
than a million and a half, but less than two millions, may be taken, 
xara n).aTog } as lying between one-fourth and one-third of Rome. To 
discuss this question thoroughly, would require a separate memoir: 
meantime I will make this remark: — That the ordinary computations 
of a million, or a million and a quarter, derived from the surviving ac- 
counts of the different ' regions,' with their circumstantial enumerations 
of the private houses and public edifices, are erroneous in two capital 
points : firsts and chiefly, because these accounts apply to Rome within 
the Pomoerium, and are, therefore, no more valid for the total Rome of 
Trajan's time, stretching so many miles beyond it, than the bills of mor- 
tality for ' London within the walls,' can serve at this day as a base for 
estimating the population of that total London which we mean and pre- 
sume in our daily conversation. Secondly^ Even for the Rome within 
these limits, the computations are not commensurate, by not allowing for 
the prodigious height of the houses in Rome, which much transcended that 
of modern cities. On this last point, I shall translate a single and very 
remarkable sentence from the Greek Rhetorician Aristides ; it will be 
known to a few readers, but to many more it will be new and interesting : 
* And, as oftentimes we see that a man who greatly excels others in bulk 
and strength, is not content with any display, however ostentatious, of 
his powers, short of that where he is exhibited surmounting himself with 
a pyramid of other men, one set standing upon the shoulders of another ; 
so also this city, stretching her foundations over areas so vast, is yet not 
satisfied with those superficial dimensions; that contents her not; but 
upon one city rearing another of corresponding proportions, and upon 
that anoiher, pile resting upon pile, houses overlaying houses, in aerial 
succession ; in that way, she achieves a character of architecture justify- 
ing, as it were, the very promise of her name ; and with reference to 
that name, and its Grecian meaning, we may say, that here nothing 
meets our eyes in any direction, but mere Rome ! Rome!' (Note this 



LONDON. 51 

avoid the dust, we approached London by rural lanes and 
roads comparatively quiet and shady, collateral to the 
main ones, where any such could be found. In that mode 
of approach, we missed some features of the sublimity 
belonging to any of the common approaches upon a main 
road; what I mean is, the whirl and uproar, the tumult 



word r Piour n on which the rhetorician plays, is the common Greek term 
for strength ) 'And hence I derive the following conclusion: that, if 
any one, decomposing this series of strata, were disposed to unshell, as 
it were, this existing Rome, from its present crowded and towering 
co-acervations ; and thus degrading these aerial Romes, were to plant 
them on the ground, side by side, in orderly succession ; according to all 
appearance, the whole vacant area of Italy would be filled with these 
dismantled storeys of Rome, and we should be presented with the spec- 
tacle of one continuous city, stretching its labyrinthine pomp to the 
shores of the Adriatic' This is so far from being meant as a piece of 
rhetoric, that on the very contrary, the whole purpose is to substitute for 
a vague and rhetorical expression of the Roman grandeur, one of a more 
definite character, by presenting its dimensions in a new form, and sup- 
posing the city to be uncrested, as it were, the upper tiers to be what 
sailors call unshipped, and the dethroned storeys, (or flats as they are 
called in Scotland,) to be all drawn up in rank and file upon the ground ; 
according to which assumption, he says, that the city would stretch 
about seventy or seventy-five miles. 

The fact is, as Casaubon remarked, upon occasion of a ridiculous 
blunder in estimating the largesses of a Roman Emperor, the error on. 
most questions of Roman policy or institutions, tends not, as usual, in 
the direction of excess, but of defect. All things were colossal there; 
and the probable, as estimated upon our modern scale, is not unfrequently 
the impossible, as regarded Roman habits. Lipsius certainly erred ex- 
travagantly at times, and was a rash speculator on many subjects ; wit- 
ness his book on the Roman amphitheatres ; but not on the magnitude 
of Rome, or the amount of its population. I shall add upon this sub- 
ject, that the whole political economy of the ancients, if we except 
Boeckh's accurate investigations, (Die Staatshaushaltxing der Athener,) 
which, properly speaking, are mere political arithmetic or statistics, is a 
mine into which scarce a single shaft has yet been sunk. Yet I must 
also add, that everything will depend upon collation of r acts, and the 
bringing of indirect notices into immediate juxtaposition, so as to throw 
light on each other. Direct and positive information there is little on 
these topics ; and that little has been gleaned. 



52 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

and the agitation, which continually thicken and thicken 
throughout the last eight or ten miles before you reach 
the suburbs. Already at three stages' distance upon some 
of the greatest roads, the dim presentiment of some vast 
capital reaches you obscurely, and like a misgiving. This 
blind sympathy with a mighty but unseen object in your 
neighborhood, continues to increase, you know not how. 
Arrived at the last station for changing horses, Barnet 
suppose, on one of the north roads, or Hounslow on the 
western, you no longer think (as in all other places) of 
naming the next stage ; nobody says, on pulling up, 
1 Horses on to London' — that would sound ludicrous; 
one mighty idea broods over all minds, making it impos- 
sible to suppose any other destination. Launched upon this 
final stage, you soon begin to feel yourself entering the 
stream as it were of a Norwegian maelstrom : and the 
stream at length becomes a rush. What is meant by the 
Latin word trepidatio ? Not anything peculiarly connect- 
ed with panic ; it belongs as much to the hurrying to and 
fro of a coming battle, as of a coming flight; agitation is 
the nearest English word. This trepidation increases 
both audibly and visibly at every half mile, pretty much 
as one may suppose the roar of Niagara ant3 the vibration 
of the ground to grow upon the ear in the last ten miles 
of approach, with the wind in its favor, until at length it 
would absorb and extinguish all other sounds whatsoever. 
Finally, for miles before you reach a 'suburb of London, 
such as Islington for instance, a last great sign and augury 
of the immensity which belongs to the coming metropolis, 
forces itself upon the dullest observer, in the growing sense 
of his own utter insignificance. Everywhere else in Eng- 
land, you yourself, horses, carriage, attendants (if you 
travel with any) are regarded with attention, perhaps even 
curiosity : at all events you are seen. But after passing 



LONDON. 53 

the final post-house on every avenue to London, for the 
latter ten or twelve miles, you become aware that you are 
no longer noticed : nobody sees you ; nobody hears you ; 
nobody regards you ; you do not even regard yourself. In 
fact, how should you, at the moment of first ascertaining 
your own total unimportance in the sum of things — a 
poor shivering unit in the aggregate of human life ? Now, 
for the first time, whatever manner of man you were or 
seemed to be at starting, squire or ; squireen,' lord or lord- 
ling, and however related to that city, hamlet, or solitary 
house, from which yesterday or to-day you slipt your ca- 
ble, — beyond disguise you find yourself but one wave in 
a total Atlantic, one plant, (and a parasitical plant besides, 
needing alien props,) in a forest of America. 

These are feelings which do not belong by preference 
to thoughtful people — far less to people merely senti- 
mental. No man ever was left to himself for the first 
time in the streets, as. yet unknown, of London, but he 
must have been saddened and mortified, perhaps terrified, 
by the sense of desertion and utter loneliness which 
belong to his situation. No loneliness can be like that 
which weighs upon the heart in the centre of faces never- 
ending, without voice or utterance for him ; eyes innu- 
merable, that have ' no speculation ' in their orbs which 
he can understand ; and hurrying figures of men and 
women weaving to and fro, with no apparent purposes 
intelligible to a stranger, seeming like a masque of 
maniacs, or a pageant of shadowy illusions. The great 
length of the streets, in many quarters of London, the 
continual opening of transient glimpses into other vistas 
equally far-stretching, going off at angles to the one 
which you are traversing, and the murky atmosphere 
which, settling upon the remoter end of every long 
avenue, wraps its termination in gloom and uncertainty — 



54 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

all these are circumstances aiding that sense of vastness 
and illimitable proportions, which for ever brood over the 
aspect of London in its interior. Much of the feeling 
which belongs to the outside of London, in its approaches 
for the last few miles, I had lost, in consequence of the 
stealthy route of bye-roads through which we crept into 
the suburbs. But for that reason, the more abrupt and 
startling had been the effect of emerging somewhere into 
the Edge ware road, and soon afterwards into the very 
streets of London itself ; — though what streets, or even 
what quarter of London, is now totally obliterated from 
my mind, having perhaps never been comprehended. 
All that I remember is, one monotonous awe and blind 
sense of mysterious grandeur and Babylonian confusion, 
which seemed to pursue and to invest the whole equipage 
of human life, as we moved for nearly two hours, through 
streets ; sometimes brought to anchor for ten minutes or 
more, by what is technically called a ' lock,' that is, a 
line of carriages of every description inextricably massed, 
and obstructing each other, far as the eye could stretch ; 
and then, as if under an enchanter's rod, the ' lock ' 
seemed to thaw, motion spread with the fluent race of 
light or sound, through the whole ice-bound mass, until 
the subtle influence reached us also ; who were again 
absorbed into the great rush of flying carriages ; or at 
times we turned off into some less tumultuous street, but 
of the same mile-long character ; and, finally, drew up 
about noon, and alighted at some place which is as little 
within my distinct remembrances as the route by which 
we reached it. 

For what had we come ? To see London. And what 
were the limits within which we proposed to crowd that 

little feat ? At five o'clock we were to dine at P , a 

seat of Lord VV 's grandfather; and, from the dis- 



LONDON. 55 

tance, it was necessary that we should leave London at 
half- past three ; so that a little more than three hours 
were all we had. Our charioteer, my friend's tutor, was 
summoned away from us on business, until that hour ; 
and we were left, therefore, entirely to ourselves and to 
our own discretion in turning the time to the best account, 
for contriving (if such a thing were possible) to do some- 
thing or other which, by any fiction of courtesy, or 
constructively, so as to satisfy a lawyer, or in a sense 
sufficient to win a wager, might be taken and received for 
having ' seen London.' 

What could be done ? We sat down, I remember, in a 
mood of despondency, to consider. Not that there was 
any want of alluring and promising spectacles : on the 
contrary there were too many ; inopes nos copia fecit ; 
and the choice was distracted. But which of them all 
could be thought general or representative enough to 
stand for the universe of London ? We could not 
traverse the whole circumference of this mighty orb ; 
that was clear ; and, therefore, the next best thing was 
to place ourselves as much as possible in some relation 
to the spectacles of London, which might answer to the 
centre. Yet how ? That sounded well and metaphysical ; 
but what did it mean if acted upon ? Apparently that 
we should stay at our inn : for in that way we seemed 
best to distribute our presence equally amongst all, viz. 
by going to none in particular. 

Three times in my life I have had my taste, that is, 
my sense of proportions, memorably outraged. Once 
was, by a painting of Cape Horn, which seemed almost 
treasonably below its rank and office in the world, — as 
the terminal abutment of our mightiest continent, and 
also the hinge or point, as it were, of our greatest cir- 
cumnavigations, — of all, in fact, which can be called 



56 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

our classical circumnavigations. To have ' doubled Cape 
Horn' — at one time, what a sound it had! — Yet how- 
ashamed we should be, if that Cape were ever to be seen 
from the moon ! A party of Englishmen, I have heard, 
went up Mount Etna, during the night, to be ready for 
sunrise, — a common practice with tourists, both in 
Switzerland, Wales, Cumberland, &c. ; but as all who 
take the trouble to reflect, not likely to repay the trouble ; 
and so thought, in the sequel, the Etna party. The sun, 

J^sXT indeed, rose visibly, and not more apparelled in clouds 
than was desirable : yet so disappointed were they with 
the whole effect, and so disgusted with the sun in par- 
ticular, that they unanimously hissed him ; though of 
course it was useless to cry 'off! off!' Here, however, 
the fault was in their own erroneous expectations, and not 
in the sun, who, doubtless, did his best. For, generally, 
\ ,a sunrise and a sunset, ought to be seen from the valley 

(Ktf* or horizontally,* — not, as the man of Kentuck expressed 
it, slantindicularly . But as to Cape Horn, that (by com- 
parison with its position and its functions) seems really a 
disgrace to the planet ; for, consider, it is not only the 
c specular mount,' keeping watch and ward over a sort of 
trinity of oceans, and, by all tradition, the gate of 
entrance to the Pacific, but also it is the temple of the 
god Terminus, for all the Americas. So that, in rela- 



* Hence it may be said, that nature regulates our position for such 
spectacles, without any intermeddling of ours. When, indeed, a moun- 
tain stands like Snowdon or Great Gavel, in Cumberland, in the centre 
of a mountainous region, it is not denied that, at some seasons when the 
early beams strike through great vistas in the hills, splendid effects of 
light and shade are sometimes produced; strange, however, rather than 
beautiful. But from an insuhted mountain, or one upon the outer rinsr 
of the hilly tract, such as Skiddaw, in Cumberland, the first effect is to 
translate the landscape from a picture into a map ; and the final result, 
as a celebrated author once said, is the infinity of littleness. A { 



LONDON. 57 

tion to such dignities, it seemed to me, in the drawing, 
a make-shift, put up by a carpenter, until the true Cape 
Horn should be ready, or perhaps a drop scene from the 
Opera House. This was one case of disproportion : the 
others were, — the final and ceremonial valediction of 
Garrick, on retiring from his profession ; and the Pall 
Mall inauguration of George IV. on the day of his acces- 
sion * to the throne. The utter trrelation, in both cases, 
of the audience to the scene, (audience, I say, as say 
we must, for the sum of the spectators in the second 
instance, as well as of the auditors in the first,) threw 
upon each a ridicule not to be effaced. It is in any case 
impossible for an actor to say words of farewell to those 
for whom he really designs his farewell. He cannot 
bring his true object before himself. To whom is it that 
he would offer his last adieus ? We are told by one, — 
who, if he loved Garrick, certainly did not love Garrick's 
profession, nor would even, through him, have paid it any 
undue compliment, that the retirement of this great artist 
had ' eclipsed the gaiety of nations.' To nations then, to 
his own generation, it was that he owed his farewell : but 
of a generation, what organ is there which can sue or be 
sued, that can thank or be thanked ? Neither by fiction, 



* Accession was it, or his proclamation ? The case was this: — About 
the middle of the day, (whether in plain clothes, or wearing any official 
costume, I do not recollect,) the King came out into the portico of Carl- 
ton House, and addressing himself (addressing his gestures I mean) to 
the assemblage of people in Pall Mall, he bowed repeatedly to the right 
and to the left, and then retired. I mean no disrespect to that prince in 
recalling those circumstances: no doubt, he acted upon the suggestion of 
others, and perhaps also under a sincere emotion on witnessing the en- 
thusiasm of those outside: but that could not cure the original absurdity 
of recognising as a representative audience, cloihed with the national 
functions of recognising himself, a chance gathering in a single street, 
between whom and the mob, from his own stables and kitchens, there 
was no essential difference. 
5 



58 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

nor by delegation, can you bring their bodies into court. 
A king's audience, on the other hand, might be had as an 
authorized representative body. But, when we consider 
the composition of a casual and chance auditory, whether 
in a street or a theatre ; secondly, the small size of a 
modern audience, even in Drury Lane, (3000 at the 
most,) not by one eightieth part the complement of the 
Circus Maximus ; most of all, when we consider the want 
of symmetry, to any extended duration of time, in the 
acts of such an audience, which acts lie in the vanishing 
expressions of its vanishing emotions, — acts so essen- 
tially fugitive, even when organized into an art and a 
tactical system of imbrices and bombi, (as they were at 
Alexandria, and afterwards at the Neapolitan theatres and 
those of Rome,) they could not, by any art, protect them- 
selves from dying in the very moment of their birth ; — 
laying together ail these considerations, we see the incon- 
gruity of any audience, so constituted, to any purpose 
less evanescent than their own tenure of existence. 

Just such in disproportion as these cases had severally 
been, was our present problem in relation to our time or 
other means for accomplishing it. We were to see 
London, which, under what approximation were we to 
execute, unless, (like the student in Hierocles,) by bring- 
ing off a brick in our pockets ? 

In debating the matter we lost half an hour ; but at 
length we reduced the question to a choice between 
Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral. I know 
not that we could have chosen better. The rival edifices, 
as we understood from the waiter, were about equidistant 
from our own station ; but being too remote from each 
other to allow of our seeing both, c we tossed up ' to settle 
the question between the elder lady and the younger. 
' Heads ' came up, which stood for the Abbey. But, as 



LONDON. 59 

neither of us was quite satisfied with this decision, we 
agreed to make another appeal to the wisdom of chance, 
second thoughts being best. This time the Cathedral 
turned up ; and so it happened that with us, the having 
seen London, meant having seen St. Paul's. 

The first view of St. Paul's, it may well be supposed, 
overwhelmed us with awe ; and I did not at that time 
imagine that the sense of magnitude could be more 
deeply impressed. One thing, however, though appar- 
ently a trifle, and really a trifle if otherwise managed, 
interrupted our pleasure a good deal. The superb objects 
of curiosity within the Cathedral were shown for separate 
fees. There were seven, I think ; and any one could be 
seen independently of the rest for a few pence. The 
w r hole amount w T as a trifle ; but we were followed by a 
sort of persecution — 'Would we not see the bell?' — - 
1 Would we not see the model ? ' — c Surely we would not 
go away without visiting the Whispering Gallery r ' which 
troubled the silence and sanctity of the place, and must 
teaze others as it then teazed us, who wished to contem- 
plate in quiet a great monument of the national grandeur, 
and which was at that very time * beginning to take a 
station also in the land, as a depository for the dust of 
her heroes. What struck us most in the whole interior 
of the pile, was the view taken from the spot immediately 
under the dome, being, in fact, the very same which, five 
years afterwards, received the remains of Lord Nelson. 
In one of the aisles going off from this centre, we saw 
the flags of France, Spain, and Holland, the whole 
trophies of the war, in short, expanding their massy 
draperies, slowly and heavily, in the upper gloom, as they 

* Already monuments had been voted by the House of Commons in 
this cathedral, and were nea ly completed, I think, to two captains who 
had fallen at the Nile. 



60 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

were swept at intervals by currents of air. Boys do not 
sentimentalize, or much express their feelings ; but they 
have feelings of a solemn nature, though easily giving 
way to trivial interruptions, no less than their seniors ; 
and we were provoked by the showman at our elbow, 
taking this moment for his vile iteration of ' Twopence, 
Gentlemen, no more than twopence for each ; ' and so on 
until we left the place. The same complaint has been 
often made as to Westminster Abbey ; and the sting of 
the complaint has been thrown into a shape which I could 
not, in justice, assent to without further inquiry. Where 
the wrong lies, or where it commences, I know not. 
Certainly I nor any man has a right to expect that the 
poor men who attended us should give up their time for 
nothing, or even to be angry with them for a sort of 
persecution, on the degree of which possibly might 
depend the comfort of their own families. Thoughts of 
famishing children at home, leave little room for nice 
regards of delicacy abroad. The individuals, therefore, 
might or might not be blameable. But in any case the 
system is palpably wrong. The nation is entitled to a 
free unmolested access to its own public monuments : not 
access merely, but to the use of them ; not free only in 
the sense of being gratuitous, but free also from the 
molestation of showmen, with their imperfect knowledge 
and vulgar sentiment. 

Yet. after all, what is this system of restriction and 
annoyance, compared with that which operates on the use 
of the national libraries ; or that again to the system of 
exclusion from some of these, where an absolute interdict 
lies upon any use at all of that which is confessed! v 
national property ? Books and MSS. which were collected 
originally and formally bequeathed to the public, under 
the generous and noble purpose of giving to future gen- 



LONDON. 61 

orations advantages which the collector had himself not 
enjoyed, and liberating them from obstacles in the pursuit 
of knowledge, which experience had bitterly imprinted 
upon his own mind, are at this day locked up as absolutely 
against me, you, or anybody, as any collection confessedly 
private. Nay, far more so ; for all private collectors of 
eminence, as the late Mr. Heber, for instance, have been 
distinguished for liberality in lending the rarest of their 
books to those who knew how to use them with effect. 
But in the cases I now contemplate, the whole funds for 
supporting the proper offices attached to a library, libra- 
rians, sub-librarians, &c. which of themselves (and with- 
out the express verbal evidence of the founder's will) 
presume a public in the daily use of the books, else they 
are superfluous, have been applied to the creation of lazy 
sinecures, in behalf of persons expressly charged with 
the care of shutting out the public. Therefore, it is true, 
they are not sinecures : for that one care, vigilantly to 
keep out the public,* they do take upon themselves ; and 



* This place suggests the mention of another crying abuse connected 
with this subject. In the year 1811 or 1810, came under Parliamentary 
notice and revision the law of Copyright. In some excellent pamphlets 
drawn forth by the occasion, from Mr. Duppa, for instance, and several 
others, the whole subject was well probed, and many aspects, little 
noticed by the public, were exposed, of that extreme injustice attached 
to the law as it then stood. The several monopolies connected with 
books were noticed a little; and not a little notice was taken of the 
oppressive privilege with which certain public libraries were invested, 
of exacting, severally, a copy of each new book published. This down- 
right robbery was palliated by some members of the House in that day, 
under the notion of its being a sort of exchange, or quid pro quo in 
return for the relief obtained by the statute of Queen Anne — the first 
which recognised literary property. 'For,' argued they, ' previously to 
that statute, supposing your book pirated, at common law you could 
obtain redress only for each copy -proved to have been sold by the pirate ; 
and that might not be a thousandth part of the actual loss. Now, the 
statute of Queen Anne granting you a general redress, upon proof that 



62 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

why ? A man loving books like myself, might suppose 
that their motive was the ungenerous one of keeping the 



a piracy had been committed, you. the party relieved, were bound to 
express your sense of this relief by a return made to the public ; and 
the pubiic is here represented by the great endowed libraries of the seven 
universities, the British Museum, &c. &c.' But prima facie, this was 
that selling- of justice which is expressly renounced in Magna Charta: 
and why were proprietors of copyright more than other proprietors, to 
make an 'acknowledgment' for their rights? But, supposing that just, 
why, especially, to the given public bodies ? Now, for my part, I think 
that this admits of an explanation : Nine-tenths of the authors in former 
days, lay amongst the class who had received a college education; and 
most of these, in their academic life, had benefited largely by old en- 
dowments. Giving up, therefore, a small tribute from their copyright, 
there was some color of justice in supposing that they were making a 
slight acknowledgment for past benefits received, and exactly for those 
benefits which enabled them to appear with any advantage as authors. 
So, I am convinced, the 'servitude' first arose, and under this construc- 
tion ; which, even for those days, was often a fiction, but now generally 
such. However, be the origin what it may, the ground, upon which the 
public mind in 1811 (that small part of it at least which the question 
attracted), reconciled itself to the abuse, was this. For a trivial wrong, 
(but it was then shown that the wrong was not always trivial,) one 
great good is achieved, viz., that all over the kingdom are dispersed 
eleven great depositories, in which all persons interested may, at all 
times, be sure of finding one copy of every book published That did 
seem a great advantage and a balance politically, (if none morally,) to 
the injustice upon which it grew. But now mark the degree in which 
this balancing advantage is made available. 1. The eleven bodies are 
not equally careful to exact their copies ; that can only be done by 
retaining an agent in London; and this agent is careless about books 
of slight money value. 2. Were it otherwise, of what final avail would 
a perfect set of the year's productions prove to a public not admitted 
freely to the eleven libraries? 3. But finally, if they were admitted, to 
what purpose, (as regards this particular advantage ) under the following 
custom, which, in some of these eleven libraries, (possibly iu all,) was I 
well knew, established: annually the principal librarian weeded the 
annual crop of all such books as displeased himself; upon which two 
questions arise. 1. Upon what principle? 2. With what result? I 
answer as to the first, in his lustration (to borrow a Roman idea) he 
went upon no principle at all, but his own caprice, or what he called his 
own discretion ; and accordingly it is a fact known to many as well as 



LONDON. 63 

books to themselves. Far from it. In several instances 
they will as little use the books as suffer them to be used. 
And thus the whole plans and cares of the good (I will 
say, weighing his motives, of the pious) founder have ter- 
minated in locking up and sequestrating a large collection 
of books, some being great rarities, in situations where 
they cannot be opened. Had he bequeathed them to the 
catacombs of Paris or of Naples, he could not have better 
provided for their virtual extinction. I ask, does no action 
at common law lie against the promoters of such enor- 
mous abuses ? Oh, thou fervent reformer, whose tread 
he that puts his ear to the ground may hear at a distance 
coming onwards upon every road — if sometimes thou 
wilt work me and others suffering, from which I shall not 



myself, that a book, which some people (and certainly not the least 
meditative of this age) have pronounced the most original work of 
modern times, was actually amongst the books thus degraded ; it was 
one of those, as the phrase is, tossed ' into the basket ; ' and universally 
this fate is more likely to befall a work of original merit, which disturbs 
the previous way of thinking and feeling, than one of timid compliance 
with ordinary models. Secondly with what result? For the present, the 
degraded books, having been consigned to the basket, were forthwith 
consigned to a damp cellar. There, at any rate, they were in no condi- 
tion to be consulted by the public, being piled up in close bales, and in a 
place not publicly accessible. But there can be no doubt that, sooner or 
later, their mouldering condition would be made an argument for selling 
them. And such, when we trace the operation of this law to its final 
stage, such is the ultimate result of an infringement upon private rights, 
almost unexampled in any other part of our civil economy. That sole 
beneficial result, for the sake of which some legislators were willing to 
sanction a wrong, otherwise admitted to be indefensible, is so little pro- 
tected and secured to the public, that it is first of all placed at the mercy 
of an agent in London, whose negligence or indifference may defeat the 
provision altogether ; (I know a publisher of a splendid botanical work, 
who told me that by forbearing to attract notice to it within the statuta- 
ble time, he saved his eleven copies,) and again placed at the mercy of 
a librarian who, (or any one of whose successors,) may, upon a motive 
of malice to the author or an impulse of false taste, after all proscribe 
any part of the books thus objectionably acquired. 



64 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

shrink, work also for me a little good, — this way turn the 
great hurricanes and levanters of thy wrath — winnow me 
this chaff; and let us see at last the gamers of pure 
wheat laid up in elder days for our use, and for two 
centuries closed against our use ! 

London we left in haste, to keep an engagement of 
some standing at the Earl of H 's, my friend's grand- 
father. This great admiral, who had filled so large a 
station in the public eye, being the earliest among the 
naval heroes of England in the first war of the Revolu- 
tion, and the only one of noble birth, I should have been 
delighted to see; St. Paul's, and its naval monuments to 

Captain Riou and Captain , together with its floating 

pageantries of conquered flags, having awakened within 
me, in a form of peculiar solemnity, those patriotic re- 
membrances of past glories, which all boys feel so much 
more vividly than men can do, in whom the sensibility to 
such impressions is blunted. Lord H., however, I was 
not destined to see. Of late years, he had generally been 
absent on public duties ; but, on this occasion, his absence 
was probably due to a reason which will make the reader 
smile : I believe, but am not perfectly certain, that he was 
dead ; and I have no peerage within my reach by which 
I could settle that point. The fact is, my knowledge of 
the family had been too slight and interrupted to have 
fixed in my memory any chronology of its history. And 
though I then knew the exact state of the facts, at present 
I have entirely forgotten everything beyond the mere act 
of his absence. A death, however, at any rate, there 
had been, and very recently, in the family, and under 
circumstances peculiarly startling ; and the spirits of the 
whole house were painfully depressed by that event, at 
the time of our visit. One of the daughters, a younger 
sister of my friend's mother, had been engaged for some 



LORD M TON. 65 

time to a Scottish nobleman, the earl of M — ton, much 
esteemed by the Royal Family. The day was at length 
fixed for the marriage ; and about a fortnight before that 
day arrived, some particular dress or ornament was 

brought to P , in which it was designed that the bride 

should appear at the altar. The fashion as to this point 
has often varied ; but at that time the custom was for 
bridal parties to be in full dress. The lady, when the 
dress arrived, was, to all appearance, in good health ; but, 
by one of those unaccountable misgivings which are on 
record in many well-attested cases, (as that, for example, 
of Andrew MarvelPs father,) she said, after gazing for a 
minute or two at the beautiful dress, firmly and pointedly, 
c That, then, is my wedding dress ; and it is expected I 
shall wear it on Thursday the 17th ; but I shall not ; I 
shall never wear it. On Thursday the 17th, I shall be 
dressed in a shroud ! ' All present were shocked at such 
a declaration, which the solemnity of the lady's manner 
made it imposssible to receive as a jest. The old Count- 
ess, her mother, even reproved her with some severity for 
the words, as an expression of distrust in the goodness of 
God. The bride-elect made no answer, but sighed heavily. 
Within a fortnight all happened, to the letter, as she had 
predicted. She was taken suddenly ill : she died about 
three days before the marriage day ; and was finally 
dressed in her shroud, according to the natural course 
of the funeral arrangements, on her expected marriage 
morning. 

Lord M — ton, the nobleman thus suddenly and re- 
markably bereaved of his bride, was the only gentleman 
who appeared at the dinner-table. He took a particular 
interest in literature ; and it was, in fact, through his kind- 
ness that, for the first time in my life, I found myself 
somewhat in the situation of a i lionS The occasion of 



66 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

Lord M.'s flattering notice was a particular copy of verses 
which had gained for me a puhlic distinction ; not, how- 
ever, I must own, a very brilliant one ; the prize awarded 
to me being not the first, nor even the second : it was 
simply the third : and that fact stated nakedly, might 
have left it doubtful whether I were to be considered in 
the light of one honored or of one stigmatized. However, 
the judges in this case, with more honesty, or more self- 
distrust, at least, than belongs to most adjudications of 
the kind, had printed the first three of the successful 
essays. Consequently, it was left open to each of the 
less successful candidates to benefit by any difference of 
taste amongst their several friends ; and my friends, in 
particular, with the single exception of my mother, who 
always thought her own children inferior to other people's, 
(partly, I believe, on a religious principle of repressing 
our vanity, and partly, also, in a spirit of unaffected 
modesty about everything connected with herself,) had 
generally assigned the palm to myself. Lord M. protested 
loudly that the case admitted of no doubt ; that gross in- 
justice had been done me ; and, as the ladies of the 
family were much influenced by his opinion, I thus came, 
not only to wear the laurel in their estimation, but also 
with the advantageous addition of having suffered some 
injustice. I was not only a victor, but a victor in mis- 
fortune. 

At this moment, looking back from- a distance of thirty 
and odd years upon those trifles, it may well be supposed 
that I do not attach importance enough to the subject of 
my fugitive honors, as to have any very decided opinion 
one way or the other upon my own proportion of merit. 
I do not even recollect the major part of the verses : that 
which I do recollect, inclines me to think that in the struc- 
ture of the metre, and in the choice of the expressions, I 



LORD M TON. 67 

had some advantage over my competitors, though other- 
wise, perhaps, my verses were less finished ; Lord M. 
might, therefore, in a partial sense, have been just, as 
well as kind. But, little as that may seem likely, even 
then, and at the moment of reaping some advantage from 
my honors, which gave me a consideration with the family 
I was amongst, such as I could not else have had, most 
unaffectedly I doubted in my own mind whether I were 
really entitled to the praises which 1 received. My own 
verses had not at all satisfied myself; and though I felt 
elated by the notice they had gained me, and gratified by 
the generosity of the noble Scotchman in taking my part 
so warmly, I was so, much more in a spirit of sympathy 
with the kindness thus manifested in mv behalf, and with 
the consequent kindness which it procured me from others, 
than from any incitement or support which it gave to my 
intellectual pride. In fact, though proud as a fiend of 
those intellectual gifts which I believed or which I knew 
myself to possess, I made even in those days so far a just 
estimate of my pretensions as not to imagine my particu- 
lar vocation to lie in poetry. Well indeed I knew, and I 
know that — had I chosen to enlist amongst the soi-disant 
poets of the day, — amongst those I mean who, by mere 
force of talent and mimetic skill, contrive to sustain the 
part of poet in a scenical sense, and with a scenical effect 
— I also could have won such laurels as are won by such 
merit ; I also could have taken and sustained a place 
taliter qualiler amongst the poets of the time. Why not 
then ? Because I knew that me, as them, would await 
the certain destiny in reversion, of resigning that place, 
in the next generation, to some other candidate having 
equal or greater skill in appropriating the vague senti- 
ments, and old traditionary language of passion spread 
through books, and having the advantage of novelty, 



68 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

and of a closer adaptation to the prevailing taste of the 
day. Even at that early age I was keenly alive, if not 
50 keenly as at this moment, to the fact, that by far the 
larger proportion of what is received in every age for 
poetry, and for a season usurps that consecrated name, is 
not the spontaneous overflow of real unaffected passion, 
deep, and at the same time original, and also forced into 
public manifestation of itself from the necessity which 
cleaves to all passion alike of seeking external sympathy : 
this it is not ; but a counterfeit assumption of such pas- 
sion, according to the more or less accurate judgment of 
the writer, for distinguishing the key of passion suited to 
the particular case, and an assumption of the language of 
passion, according to his more or less skill in separating 
the spurious from the native and legitimate diction of 
real excitement. Rarely, indeed, are the reputed poets 
of any age men who groan, like prophets, under the bur- 
then of a message which they have to deliver, and must 
deliver, of a mission which they must discharge. Gen- 
erally, nay, with much fewer exceptions, perhaps, than 
would be readily believed, they are merely simulators of 
the part they sustain ; speaking not out of the abundance 
of their own hearts, but by skill and artifice assuming or 
acting emotions at second-hand ; and the whole is a 
business of talent, (sometimes even of great talent,) but 
not of original power, of genius,* or authentic inspira- 
tion. 

* The words genius and talent are frequently distinguished from each 
other by those who evidently misconstrue the true distinction entirely, 
and sometimes so grossly as to use them by way of expressions for a mere 
difference in degree. Thus, ' a man of great talent, absolutely a ge- 
nius,'' occurs in a very well written tale at this moment before me ; as 
if being a man of genius implied only a greater than ordinary degree of 
talent. 

Talent and genius are in no one point allied to each other, except 



FETE AT FROGMORE. 69 

From P we returned to Eton. Her Majesty about 

this time gave some splendid fetes at Frogmore ; to one 
or two of which she had laid her commands upon a great 
officer of her household that we should be invited. The 
invitation was, of course, on my friend's account ; but 
her Majesty had condescended to direct that I, as his 
visiter, should be specially included. Lord W., young as 
he was, had become tolerably indifferent about such things ; 
but to me such a scene was a novelty ; and, on that ac- 
count, it was settled we should go. We did go : and 1 
was not sorry to have made the sacrifice of a few hours, 
for the gratification of once, at least, witnessing the splen- 
dors of a royal party. But a sacrifice it certainly was : 
and, after the first edge of expectation was taken off — 
after the vague uncertainties of ignorance had given place 
to absolute realities, and the eye had become a little fa- 
miliar with the splendors of the dresses, &c, I began to 
suffer under the constraints incident to a young person in 
such a situation. The music, in fact, was all that con- 
tinued to delight me ; and, but for that, I believe, I should 
have had some difficulty in avoiding so monstrous an 

generically ; that both express modes of intellectual power. But the 
kinds of power are not merely different, they are in polar opposition to 
each other. Talent is intellectual power of every kind, which acts and 
manifests itself by and through the wUl t and the active forces. Genius, 
as the verbal origin implies, is that much rarer species of intellectual 
power which is derived from the genial nature — from the spirit of suf- 
fering and enjoying — from the spirit of pleasure and pain, as organized 
more or less perfectly ; and this is independent of the will. It is a 
function of the passive nature. Talent is conversant with the adaptation 
of means to ends. But genius is conversant only with ends. Talent 
has no sort of connection, not the most remote or shadowy, with the 
moral nature or temperament, — genius is steeped and saturated with 
this moral nature. Talent (to use an old distinction of the schoolmen of 
our elder English poets, Milton, for example, Paradise Lost, B. V. 1. 4S3. 
and also a revived distinction of Immanuel Kant's) is discursive : genius, 
like the angelic understanding, is inluitivc. 



70 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

indecorum as yawning. The ball-room, a temporary 
erection, with something of the character of a pavilion 
about it, wore an elegant and festal air ; the part allotted 
to the dancers being fenced off by a gilded lattice-work, 
and ornamented beautifully from the upper part with 
drooping festoons of flowers. The dresses of the ladies 
were, as usual on such occasions, conspicuously rich : and 
in itself, of all the scenes which this world offers, none is 
to me so profoundly interesting, none (I say deliberately) 
so affecting, as the spectacle of men and women floating 
through the mazes of a dance ; under these conditions, 
however, that the music shall be rich and festal, the exe- 
cution of the dancers perfect, and the dance itself of a 
character to admit of free, fluent, and continuous motion. 
But this last condition will be sought in vain in the dis- 
gusting quadrilles, &c. which have for so many years 
banished the truly beautiful country -dances native to 
England. Those whose taste and sensibility were so 
defective as to substitute for the beautiful in dancing the 
merely difficult, were sure, in the end, to transfer the 
depravations of this art from the Opera House to the floors 
of private ball-rooms. The tendencies even then were in 
that direction ; but as yet they had not attained their final 
stage : and the English country-dance* was still in estima- 

* This word, I am well aware, grew out of the French word contre- 
danse; indicating the regular contraposition of male and female partners 
in the first arrangement of the dancers. The word country-dance was 
therefore originally a corruption; hut, having once arisen and taken 
root in the language, it is far hetter to retain it in its colloquial form : 
better, I mean, on the general principle concerned in such cases. For it 
is, in fact, by such corruptions, by offsets upon an old stock, arising 
through ignorance or mispronunciation originally, that every language is 
frequently enriched ; and new modifications of thought, unfolding them- 
selves in the progress of society, generate for themselves concurrently 
appropriate expressions. Many words in the Latin can be pointed out 
as having passed through this process. The English word properly, 



FETE AT FR0GM0RE. 71 

tion at the courts of princes. Now of all dances, this is 
the only one, as a class, of which you can truly describe 
the motion to be continuous, that is, not interrupted, or 
fitful, but unfolding its fine mazes with the equability of 
light, in its diffusion through free space. And wherever 
the music happens to be not of a light, trivial character, 
but charged with the spirit of festal pleasure, and the per- 
formers in the dance so far skilful as to betray no awk- 
wardness verging on the ludicrous, I believe that many 
people feel as I feel in such circumstances, viz., derive 
from the spectacle the very grandest form of passionate 
sadness which can belong to any spectacle whatsoever. 
Sadness is not the exact word ; nor is there any word in 



arose (according to a great authority) in this way out of propriety ; i.-e. 
the Latin idea of proprietor, split off into a secondary sense, to which it 
had long tended ; whilst by a drawing back of accent from the second 
syllable to the first, and a melting of the two middle syllables into one, 
(forming proprety, finally euphonized into property,) this secondary 
sense, hitherto liable to an ambiguity from the too wide and generic 
meaning oCpropriety, thus gained a separate and specific word ; and the 
original stock, on which the corruption had arisen, at the same time 
became disposable for a more specific limitation of its meaning than 
before. Without dwelling, however, on this particular illustration, what 
I am here taking occasion to insist on, is the general principle, that in 
every language it must not be allowed to weigh against the validity of 
a word once fairly naturalized by use, that originally it crept in upon an 
abuse or a corruption. Prescription is as strong a ground of legitimation 
in a case of this nature as it is in law. And the old axiom is applicable 
— Fieri non debuit, factum valet. Were it otherwise, languages would 
be robbed of much of their wealth. And, universally, the class oipurists, 
in matters of language, are liable to grievous suspicion, as almost con- 
stantly proceeding on kalf knowledge, and on insufficient principles. 
For example, if I have read one, I have read twenty letters, addressed to 
newspapers, denouncing the name of a great quarter in London, Mary- 
le-boue, as ludicrously ungrammatical. The writers had learned, or were 
learning French ; and they had thus become aware, that neither the 
article nor the adjective were right. True : but, for want of black- 
letter French, they did not know that in our Chaucer's time both were 
right. Le was then the article feminine as well as masculine. 



72 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

any language [because none in the finest languages] 
which exactly expresses the state ; since it is not a de- 
pressing, but a most elevating state to which I allude. 
And, certainly, people of the dullest minds can under- 
stand, that many states of pleasure, and in particular the 
highest, are the most of all removed from merriment, or 
from the ludicrous. The day on which a Roman tri- 
umphed was the most gladsome day of his existence ; it 
was the crown and consummation of his prosperity ; yet 
assuredly it was also to him the most solemn of his days. 
Festal music, of a rich and passionate character, is the 
most remote of any from vulgar hilarity. Its very glad- 
ness and pomp is impregnated with sadness ; but sadness 
of a grand and aspiring order. Let, for instance, (since 
without individual illustrations there is the greatest risk of 
being misunderstood,) any person of musical sensibility 
listen to the exquisite music composed by Beethoven, as an 
opening for Burger's Lenore, the running idea of which is 
the triumphal return of a crusading host, decorated with 
laurels and with palms, within the gates of their native 
city ; and then say whether the presiding feeling, in the 
midst of this tumultuous festivity, be not, by infinite de- 
grees, transcendent to any thing so vulgar as mere hilarity. 
In fact, laughter itself is of an equivocal nature ; — as the 
organ of the ludicrous, laughter is allied to the trivial and 
the ignoble — as the organ of joy, it is allied to the pas- 
sionate and the noble. From all which the reader may 
comprehend, if he should not happen experimentally to 
have felt, that a spectacle of young men and women, 
flowing through the mazes of an intricate dance under a 
full volume of music, taken with all the circumstantial 
adjuncts of such a scene in rich men's halls ; the blaze of 
lights and jewels, the life, the motion, the sea-like undula- 
tion of heads, the interweaving of the figures, the araxv- 



DANCING. 73 

nlmctg or self- revolving, both of the dance and the music, 
' never ending, still beginning,' and the continual regene- 
ration of order from a system of motions which seem for 
ever to approach the very brink of confusion ; that such a 
spectacle, with such circumstances, may happen to be 
capable of exciting and sustaining the very grandest emo- 
tions of philosophic melancholy to which the human spirit 
is open. The reason is, in part, that such a scene pre- 
sents a sort of masque of human life, with its whole equi- 
page of pomps and glories, its luxury of sight and sound, 
its hours of golden youth, and the interminable revolution 
of ages hurrying after ages, and one generation treading 
over the flying footsteps of another ; whilst all the while 
the overruling music attempers the mind to the spectacle, 
the subject (as a German would say) to the object, the 
beholder to the vision. And, although this is known to be 
but one phasis of life — of life culminating and in ascent, 
— yet the other, and repulsive phasis is concealed upon 
the hidden or averted side of the golden arras, known but 
not fel{ : or is seen but dimly in the rear, crowding into 
indistinct proportions. The effect of the music is, to place 
the mind in a state of elective attraction for everything in 
harmony with its own prevailing key. 

This pleasure, as always on similar occasions, I had at 
present ; and if I have spent rather more words than could 
have been requisite in describing a very obvious state of 
emotion, it is not because, in itself, it is either vague or 
doubtful, but because it is difficult, without calling upon a 
reader for a little reflection, to convince him that there is 
not something paradoxical in the assertion, that joy and 
festal pleasure, of. the highest kind, are liable to a natural 
combination with solemnity, or even melancholy the most 
profound. Yet to speak in the mere simplicity of truth 
so mysterious is human nature, and so little to be read by 
6 



74 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

him who runs, that almost every weighty aspect of truth 
upon that theme will be found at first sight startling, or 
sometimes paradoxical. And so little need is there for 
courting paradox, that, on the contrary, he who is faithful 
to his own experiences will find all his efforts little enough 
to keep down the paradoxical air of what yet he knows to 
be the truth. Xo man needs to search for paradox in this 
world of ours. Let him simply confine himself to the 
truth, and he will find paradox growing everywhere under 
his hands as rank as weeds. For new truths of impor- 
tance are rarely agreeable to any preconceived theories ; 
that is, cannot be explained by these theories : which are 
insufficient, therefore, even where they are true. And 
universally, it must be borne in mind — that not that is 
paradox which, seeming to be true, is upon examination 
false, but that which, seeming to be false, may upon ex- 
amination be found true.* 

The pleasure of which I have been speaking belongs to 
all such scenes ; but on this particular occasion there was 
also something more. To see persons in ; the body,' of 
whom you have been reading in newspapers from the very 
earliest of your reading days, — those, who have hitherto 
been great ideas in your childish thoughts, to see and to 
hear moving and talking as actual existences amongst 
other human beings, — had, for the first half hour or so, 
a singular and strange effect. But this naturally waned 
rapidly after it had once begun to wane. And when these 
first startling impressions of novelty had worn off, it must 
be confessed that the peculiar circumstances attaching to 

* And therefore it was with strict propriety that Boyle, anxious to fix 
public attention upon some truths of hydrostatics, published ihem avow- 
edly as paradoxes. They weie truths, indeed; but in the first annun- 
ciation they wore the air of falsehood. They contradicted men's pre- 
conceptions and first impressions. 



DANCING. 75 

a royal ball, were not favorable to its joyousness or genial 
spirit of enjoyment. I am not going to repay her Maj- 
esty's condescension so ill, or so much to abuse the priv- 
ileges of a guest, as to draw upon my recollections of 
what passed, for the materials of an ill-natured critique. 
Everything was done, I doubt not, which court etiquette 
permitted, to thaw those ungenial restraints which gave to 
the whole too much of a ceremonious and official char- 
acter, and to each actor in the scene too much of the air 
belonging to one who is discharging a duty, and to the 
youngest even among the principal personages concerned, 
an apparent anxiety and jealousy of manner — jealousy, I 
mean, not of others, but a prudential jealousy of his own 
possible oversights or trespasses. In fact, a great person- 
age bearing a state character cannot be regarded with the 
perfect freedom which belongs to social intercourse, nor 
ought to be. It is not rank alone which is here con- 
cerned : that, as being his own, he might lay aside for an 
hour or two ; but he bears a representative character also. 
He has not his own rank only, but the rank of others to 
protect : he embodies and impersonates the majesty of a 
great people ; and this character, were you ever so much 
encouraged to do so, you neither could nor ought to dis- 
miss from your thoughts. Besides all which, it must be 
acknowledged, that to see brothers dancing with sisters, as 
too often occurred in those dances to which the Princesses 
were parties, disturbed the appropriate interest of the 
scene, being irreconcilable with the allusive meaning of 
dancing in general, and laid a weight upon its gaiety 
which no condescensions from the highest quarter could 
remove. This infelicitous arrangement forced the thoughts 
of all present upon the exalted rank of the parties which 
could dictate so unusual an assortment. And that rank 
again it presented to us under one of its least happy 



76 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

aspects ; as insulating a blooming young woman amidst 
the choir of her coevals, and surrounding her with solitude 
amidst a vast crowd of the young, the brave, the beautiful, 
and the accomplished. 

Meantime, as respected my own humble pretensions, I had 
reason to be grateful : every kindness and attention were 
shown to me. My invitation I was sensible that I owed 
entirely to my noble friend. But, having been invited, I 
felt assured from what passed, that it was meant and pro- 
vided that I should not, by any possibility, be sufTered to 
think myself overlooked. Lord W. and I communicated 
our thoughts occasionally by means of a language, which 
we, in those days, found useful enough at times, and 
called by the name of Ziph. The language and the 
name were both derived from Winchester. Dr. Mapleton, 
a physician in Bath, who had attended me in concert with 
Mr. Grant, during the illness of my nondescript malady of 
the head, happened to have had three sons at Winchester ; 
and his reason for removing them is worth mentioning, as 
it illustrates the w r ell-known system of fagging. One or 
more of them showed to the quick, medical eye of Dr. 
M. symptoms of declining health ; and, upon cross-ques- 
tioning, he found that, being (as juniors) fags (such is 
the technical appellation) to appointed seniors, they were 
under the necessity of going out nightly into the town for 
the purpose of executing commissions ; but this was not 
easy, as all the regular outlets were closed at eight or nine 
o'clock. In such a dilemma, any route, that was merely 
practicable, at whatever risk, must be traversed by the 
loyal fag : and it so happened that none of any kind 
remained open or accessible, except one ; and this one 
communication happened to have escaped suspicion, 
simply because it lay through a succession of temples 
sacred to the goddess Cloacina. That of itself was not 



ZIPH LANGUAGE. 77 

so extraordinary a fact : the wonder lay in the number — 
seventeen. Such were the actual amount of sacred ed- 
ifices, which, through all their mephitic morasses, these 
miserable vassals had to thread all but every night of the 
week. Dr. M. when he made this discovery, ceased to 
wonder at the medical symptoms ; and as j agger y was an 
abuse too venerable and sacred to be touched by profane 
hands, he lodged no idle complaints, but simply removed 
his sons to a school where the Serbonian bogs of the subter- 
raneous goddess might not intersect the nocturnal line of 
march so very often. One day, when the worthy Doctor 
was attempting to amuse me with this anecdote, and ask- 
ing me whether I thought Hannibal would have attempted 
his march over the Little St. Bernard, supposing that he 
and the elephant which he rode had been summoned to 
explore a route lying through seventeen similar nuisances 
— he went on to mention the one sole accomplishment 
which his sons had imported from Winchester. This was 
the Ziph language, communicated at Winchester to any 
aspirant for a fixed fee of one-half guinea, but which 
the Doctor then communicated to me, as I now to the 
reader — gratis. I might perhaps have passed it over 
without notice, had I not since then ascertained that it is 
undoubtedly a bequest of elder times. Two centuries at 
least it must have existed : perhaps it may be coeval with 
the Pyramids. For in the famous Essay on a Philosoph- 
ical Character, (I forget whether that is the exact title,) a 
large folio written by the ingenious Dr. Wilkins, Bishop of 
Chester,* and published early in the reign of Charles II., 

* This Dr. Wilkins was related by marriage to Cromwell, and is bet- 
ter known to the world perhaps by his Essay on the possibility of a 
passage, [or, as the famous author of the Pursuits of Literature said, by 
way of an Episcopal metaphor, the possibility of a translation,] lo the 
moon. 



78 



LIFE AND MANNERS. 



a folio which I in youthful days not only read but studied, 
this language is recorded and accurately described amongst 
many other modes of cryptical communication, oral and 
visual, spoken, written, or symbolic. And, as the bishop 
(writing before 1665) does not speak of it as at all a 
recent invention, it may probably at that time have been 
regarded as an antique device, for conducting a conversa- 
tion in secrecy amongst by-standers ; and this advantage 
it has, that it is applicable to all languages alike, nor can 
it possibly be penetrated by one not initiated in the mys- 
tery. The secret is this, repeat the vowel or diphthong of 
every syllable, prefixing to the vowel so repeated the letter 
G. Thus, for example : — Shall we go away in an hour ? 
Three hours we have already staid. This in Ziph be- 
comes : Shagall wege gogo agawagay igin agan hougour 1 
Threegee hougours wege hagave agalreageadygy stagaid. 
It must not be supposed that Ziph proceeds slowly. A 
very little practice gives the greatest fluency ; so that even 
now, though certainly I cannot have practised it for thirty 
years, my power of speaking the Ziph remains unim- 
paired. I forget whether, in the Bishop of Chester's 
account of this cryptical language, the consonant inter- 
calated be G or not. Evidently any consonant will an- 
swer the purpose. F or L would be softer. 

In this learned tongue, it was that my friend and I 
communicated our feelings ; and having staid nearly four 
hours, a time quite sufficient to express a proper sense of 
the honor, we departed ; and, on emerging into the open 
high road, we threw up our hats and huzzaed, meaning no 
sort of disrespect, but from uncontrollable pleasure in 
recovered liberty. 

For a few minutes at this or at another of her Majesty's 

fetes, and twice on other occasions, before we finally 

quitted Eton, I again saw the King ; and always with 



THE KING. 79 

renewed interest. He was kind to everybody — con- 
descending and affable in a degree which I am bound 
to remember with personal gratitude : and one thing I 
had heard of him, which even then, and much more as 
I became capable of deeper reflection, won my respect. 
I have always reverenced a man of whom it could be 
truly said, that he had once, and once only, been des- 
perately in love ; in love, that is to say, in a terrific 
excess, so as to dally, under suitable circumstances, with 
the thoughts of cutting his own throat, or even (as the 
case might be) the throat of her whom he loved above all 
this world. It will be understood that I am not justifying 
such enormities ; but it is evident that people in general 
feel pretty much as I do, from the extreme sympathy with 
which the public always pursue the fate of any criminal 
who has committed a murder of this class, even though 
tainted (as generally it is) with jealousy, which, in itself, 
is an ignoble passion.* 

Great passions, passions moving in a great orbit, and 
transcending little regards, are always arguments of some 
latent nobility. There are, indeed, but few T men and few 
women capable of great passions, or (properly speaking) 
of passions at all. Hartley, in his mechanism of the 
human mind, propagates the sensations by means of 
vibrations, and by miniature vibrations, w T hich, in a Roman 
form for such miniatures, he terms vibratiuncles. Now of 

* Accordingly, Mr. Coleridge has contended, and I think with truth, 
that the passion of Othello is not jealousy. So much I know by report, 
as the result of a lecture which he read at the Royal Institution. His 
arguments I did not hear. To me it is evident, that Othello's state of 
feeling was not that of a degrading, suspicious rivalship ; hut the state 
of perfect misery, arising out of this dilemma, the most afTecting, per- 
haps, to contemplate, of any which can exist, viz., the dire necessity of 
loving without limit one whom the heart pronounces to be unworthy and 
irretrievably sunk. 



80 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

men and women generally, parodying that terminology, 
we ought to say — not that they are governed by passions, 
or are at all capable of passions, but of passinncles. And 
thence it is that few men go, or can go, beyond a little 
love-liking, as it is called ; and hence also, that, in a world 
where so little conformity takes place between the ideal 
speculations of men and the gross realities of life, where 
marriages are governed in so vast a proportion by conveni- 
ence, prudence, self-interest, - — anything, in short, rather 
than deep sympathy between the parties, we yet hear of 
so few tragic catastrophes on that account. The King, 
however, was certainly among the number of those who 
are susceptible of a deep passion, if everything be true 
that I have heard. All the world has heard that he was 
passionately devoted to the beautiful sister of the then 
Duke of Richmond. That was before his marriage : and 
I believe it is certain, that he not only wished, but sincere- 
ly meditated to have married her. So much is matter of 
notoriety. But other circumstances of the case have been 
sometimes reported, which imply great distraction of mind, 
and a truly profound possession of his heart by that early 
passion : which, in a prince whose feelings are liable so 
much to the dispersing and dissipating power of endless 
interruption from new objects and fresh claims on the 
attention, coupled also with the fact that he never, but in 
this one case, professed anything amounting to extrava- 
gant or frantic attachment, do seem to argue that the King 
was truly and passionately in love with Lady Sarah Lenox. 
He had a demon upon him, and, by some accounts, was 
under a real possession. If so, what a lively expression 
of the mixed condition of human fortunes, and not less of 
another truth equally affecting, viz., the dread conflicts 
with the will — the mighty agitations which silently and in 
darkness are convulsing many a heart, where, to the 



THE KING. 81 

external eye, all is tranquil, — that this King, at the very- 
threshold of his public career, at the very moment when 
he was binding about his brows the golden circle of sove- 
reignty, — when Europe watched him with interest, and 
the kings of the earth with envy, no one of the vulgar 
titles to happiness being wanting — youth, health, a throne 
the most splendid on this planet, general popularity 
amongst a nation of freemen, and the hope which belongs 
to powers as yet almost untried, — that, even under these 
most flattering auspices, he should be called upon to make 
a sacrifice the most bitter of all to which human life is 
liable ! He made it : and he might have then said to his 
people — ; For you, and to my public duties, I have made 
a sacrifice, which none of you would have made for me.' 
In years long ago, I have heard a woman of rank recur- 
ring to the circumstances of Lady Sarah's first appearance 
at Court after the King's marriage. It was either a pre- 
sentation, or it occurred at a ball ; and, if I recollect right- 
ly, after that lady's own marriage with Sir Charles Bun- 
bury. Many eyes were upon both parties at that moment, 
— females eyes especially, — and the speaker did not dis- 
guise the excessive interest with which she herself observed 
them. The lady was not agitated, but the King teas. He 
seemed anxious, sensibly trembled, changed color, and at 
last shivered, as Lady S. B. drew near. But, to quote the 
one single eloquent sentiment, which I remember after a 
lapse of thirty years, in Monk Lewis's Romantic Tales — 
1 In this world all things pass away ; blessed be Heaven, 
and the bitter pangs by which sometimes it is pleased to 
recall its wanderers, even our passions pass away ! ' And 
thus it happened that this storm also was laid asleep and 
forgotten, together with so many others of its kind, that 
have been, and that shall be again, so long as man is man, 
and woman woman. Meantime, in justification of a pas- 



82 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

sion so profound, one would be glad to think highly of the 
lady who inspired it ; and, therefore, I heartily hope that 
the insults offered to her memory in the scandalous me- 
moirs of the Due de Lauzun, are mere calumnies, and 
records rather of his presumptuous wishes, than of any 
actual successes. That book, I am aware, is generally 
treated as a forgery ; but internal evidence, drawn from 
the tone and quality of the revelations there made, will 
not allow me to think it such. There is an abandon and 
carelessness in parts which mark its sincerity. Its authen- 
ticity I cannot doubt. But that proves nothing for the 
truth of the particular stories which it contains. * 



* A book of scandalous and defamatory stories, especially when the 
writer has had the baseness to betray the confidence reposed in his honor 
by women, and to boast of favors alleged to have been granted him, it is 
always fair to consider as ipso facto a tissue of falsehoods ; and on the 
following argument, that these are exposures which, even if true, none 
but the basest of men would have made. Being, therefore, on the hypo- 
thesis most favorable to himself, the basest of men, the author is self- 
denounced as vile enough to have forged the stories, and cannot com- 
plain if he should be roundly accused of doing that which he has taken 
pains to prove himself capable of doing. This way of arguing might 
he applied with fatal effect to the Due de Lauzun's Memoirs, supposing 
them written with a view to publication. But, by possibility, that was 
not the case. The Due de L. terminated his profligate life, as is well 
known, on the scaffold, during the storms of the French Revolution ; 
and nothing in his whole career won him so much credit, as the way in 
which he closed it ; for he went to his death with a romantic careless- 
ness, and even gaiety of demeanor. His Memoirs were not published 
by himself; the publication was posthumous ; and by whom authorized, 
or for what purpose, is not exactly known. Probably the manuscript 
fell into mercenary hands, and was published merely on a speculation of 
pecuniary gain. From some passages, however, I cannot but infer that 
the writer did not mean to bring it before the public, but wrote it rather 
as a series of private memoranda, to aid his own recollection of cir- 
cumstances and dates. The Due de Lauzun's account of his intrigue 
with Lady Sarah goes so far as to allege, that he rode down in disguise, 
from London to Sir Charles B.'s country-seat, agreeably to a previous 
assignation, and that he was admitted, by that Lady's confidential 



WALES. 83 

Soon after this we left Eton for Ireland. Our first 
destination being Dublin, of course we went by Holyhead. 
The route at that time, except that it went round by Con- 
way, was pretty much the same as at present. One stage 
after leaving Shrewsbury it entered North Wales ; a stage 
farther brought us to the celebrated vale of Llangollen ; 
and on reaching the approach to this about sunset on a 
beautiful evening of June, I first found myself amongst 
mountains; a feature in natural scenery for which, from 
my earliest days, I might almost say that I had hun- 
gered and thirsted. In no one expectation of my life have 
I been less disappointed than in this ; and I may add, that 
no one enjoyment has less decayed or palled upon my 
continued experience. A mountainous region, with but 
few towns, and those of a simple pastoral character, and a 
slender population ; behold my conditions of a pleasant 
permanent dwelling-place ! The mountains of Wales range 
at about the same elevation as those of Northern Eng- 
land ; three thousand and a few odd hundreds of feet being 
the extreme limit which they reach. Generally speaking, 
their forms are less picturesque individually, and they are 
less happily grouped, than their English brethren. I have 
since also been made sensible by Mr. Wordsworth of one 
grievous defect in the structure of the Welch valleys ; too 
generally they take the basin shape. Of this, however, 
I was not aware at the time of first seeing Wales ; although 
the striking effect from the opposite form of the Cumber- 
land and Westmoreland valleys, which almost universally 
present a flat area at the base of the surrounding hills, 
level, to use Mr. Wordsworth's expression, t as thejloor of 



attendant, througli a back staircase, at a time when Sir Charles, (a 
sportsman, as all the world knows, but a man of the highest breeding,) 
was himself at home, and occupied in the duties of hospitality. 



84 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

a temple? would, at any rate, have arrested my eye, from 
its impressive beauty. No faults, however, at that early 
age, struck me or disturbed my pleasure, except that after 
one whole day's travelling, (for so long it cost us between 
Llangollen and Holyhead,) the want of water struck me 
upon review as very remarkable. From Conway to Ban- 
gor we were in sight of the sea, but fresh water we had 
seen hardly any ; no lake, no stream much beyond a 
brook. This is certainly a conspicuous defect in North 
Wales, considered as a region of fine scenery. The few 
lakes I have since become acquainted with, as that near 
Bala, near Beddkelert, and beyond Machynleth, are not 
attractive either in their forms or in their accompaniments : 
the Bala lake being meagre and insipid : the others as it 
were unfinished, and unaccomplished with their furniture 
of wood. 

At the Head, (to call it by its common colloquial name,) 
we were detained a few days in those unsteaming times by 
foul winds. Our time, however, thanks to the hospitality 
of a certain Captain Skinner on that station, did not hang 
heavy on our hands, though we were imprisoned, as it 
were, on a dull rock ; for Holyhead itself is a little island 
of rock, and a dependency of Anglesea ; which, again, is 
a little dependency of North Wales. The packets on this 
station were lucrative commands ; and they were given 
(perhaps, are given ?) to post-captains in the navy. Cap- 
tain S. was celebrated for his convivial talents, and did the 
honors of the place in a hospitable style, daily asking us 
to dine with him. 

This answered one purpose, at least, of especial con- 
venience to us all at that moment : it kept us from any 
necessity of meeting together during the day, except under 
circumstances where we escaped the necessity of any 
familiar communication with each other. Why that should 



LORD W.'s TUTOR. 85 

have become desirable, needs explanation : Upon the last 
day of our journey, Lord W 's tutor, who had accom- 
panied us thus far on our road, suddenly took offence at 
something we had said, done, or omitted, and never spoke 
one syllable to either of us again. Being both of us 
amiably disposed, and incapable of having seriously medi- 
tated either word or deed likely to wound any person's 
feelings, we were much hurt at the time, and often 
retraced the little incidents upon the road, to discover, if 
possible, what it was that had been open to any miscon- 
struction. But it remained to both of us a lasting mystery. 
This tutor was an Irishman ; and, I believe, of considerable 
pretensions as a scholar ; but, being reserved and haughty, 
or else presuming in us a knowledge of our offence, which 
we really had not, he gave us no opening for any expla- 
nation. To the last moment, however, he manifested a 
conscientious regard to the duties of his charge. He ac- 
companied us in our boat, on a dark and gusty night, to the 
packet, which lay a little out at sea. He saw us on board ; 
and then, standing up for one moment, he said, c Is all 
right on deck ? ' 6 All right, Sir,' sang out the ship's 
steward. c Have you, Lord W., got your boat-cloak with 
you?' c Yes, Sir.' 'Then, pull away, boatmen.' We 
listened for a time to the measured beat of his retreating 
oars, marvelling more and more at the atrocious nature 
of our crime, which could avail even to intercept his last 
adieus. I, for my part, never saw him again ; nor, as I 
have reason to think, Lord W. Neither did we ever 
unravel the mystery. 

As if to irritate our curiosity still more, Lord W. show- 
ed me a torn fragment of paper in his tutor's hand-writing, 
which, together with others, had been thrown (as he be- 
lieved) purposely in his way. If he was right in that belief, 
it appeared that he had missed the particular fragment 



86 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

which was designed to raise the veil upon our guilt; for 
the one he produced contained exactly these words : — 
6 With respect to your Ladyship's anxiety to know how far 
the acquaintance with Mr. X. Y. Z. is likely to be of ser- 
vice to your son, I think 1 may now venture to say that ' 

There the sibylline fragment ended; nor could we 

torture it into any further revelation. However, when we 
reached Dublin, we sate down, and addressed an ingen- 
uous account of our journey and our little mystery to my 
young friend's mother in England. For to her, it was 
clear, that the tutor had confided his wrongs. Her Lady- 
ship answered with kindness; but did not throw any light 
on the problem which exercised at once our memories, our 
skill in conjectural interpretation, and our sincere regrets. 
I mention this trifle, simply because, trifle as it is, it involv- 
ed a mystery, and furnishes an occasion for glancing at that 
topic. Mysteries as deep, with results a little more impor- 
tant, have occasionally crossed me in life ; one, in particu- 
lar, I recollect at this moment, known pretty extensively 
to the neighborhood in which it occurred. It was in the 

county of S . A lady married, and married well, as 

was thought. About twelve months afterwards, she return- 
ed alone in a post-chaise to her father's house ; paid and 
herself dismissed the postilion at the gate ; entered the 
house ; ascended to the room in which she had passed her 
youth, and known in the family by her name ; took pos- 
session of it again ; intimated by signs, and by one short 
letter at her first arrival, what she would require ; lived for 
nearly twenty years in this state of La Trappe seclusion 
and silence ; nor ever, to the hour of her death, explained 
what circumstances had dissolved the supposed happy 
connection she had formed, or what had become of her 
husband Her looks and gestures were of a nature to re- 
press all questions in the spirit of mere curiosity , and the 



AN ADVENTURE. 87 

spirit of affection naturally respected a secret which was 
guarded so severely. This might be supposed a Spanish 
tale ; yet it happened in England, and in a pretty populous 
neighborhood. The romances which occur in real life 
are too often connected with circumstances of deep and 
lasting pain to the feelings of some among the parties 
concerned ; on that account, more than for any other, they 
are often suppressed ; else, judging by the number which 
have fallen within my own knowledge, I believe they are 
of more frequent occurrence, even in our modern unro- 
mantic mode of life, than is usually supposed. In par- 
ticular, I believe that, among such romances, those cases 
form an unusual proportion in which young, innocent, 
and high-minded persons have made a sudden discovery 
of some great profligacy or deep unworthiness in the 
person to whom they had surrendered their entire affec- 
tions. That shock, more than any other, is capable of 
blighting the whole after existence, and sometimes of at 
once overthrowing the balance either of life or of reason. 
Instances I know of both ; and such afflictions are the less 
open to any alleviation, that they are of a nature so deli- 
cate as to preclude all confidential communication of them 
to another. 

A sort of adventure occurred, and not of a kind pleas- 
ant to recall, even on this short voyage. The passage 
to Dublin from the Head is about sixty miles, I believe ; 
yet, from baffling winds, it cost us upwards of thirty 
hours. The next day, on going upon deck, we found 
that our only fellow-passenger of note was a woman of 
rank, celebrated for her beauty, and not undeservedly, 
for a lovely creature she was. The body of her travelling 
coach had been, as usual, unslung from the ' carriage,' 
(by which is technically meant the wheels and the perch,) 
and placed upon deck. This she used as a place of re- 



88 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

treat from the sun during the day, and as a resting-place 
at night. For want of more interesting companions, she 
invited us, during the day, into her coach ; we taxed our 
abilities to do the agreeable, and made ourselves as enter- 
taining as we could ; and, on our parts, we were greatly 
fascinated by the lady's beauty. The second night proved 
very sultry ; and Lord W. and myself, suffering from the 
oppression of the cabin, left our berths, and lay, wrapped 
up in cloaks, upon deck. Having talked for some hours, 
we were both on the point of falling asleep, when a 
stealthy tread near our heads awoke us. It was starlight ; 
and we traced between ourselves and the sky the outline 
of a man's figure. Lying upon a mass of tarpaulins, we 
were ourselves undistinguishable ; and the figure moved in 
the direction of the coach. Our first thought was to raise 
an alarm, scarcely doubting that the purpose of the man 
was to rob the unprotected lady of her watch or purse. 
But to our astonishment, and I can add, to our real pain, 
we saw the coach door silently swing open under a touch 
from within. All was as silent as a dream ; the figure 
entered, the door closed, and we were left to interpret the 
case as we might. Strange it was that this lady could cal- 
culate upon absolute concealment in such circumstances. 
We recollected afterwards to have heard some indistinct 
rumor buzzed about the packet on the day preceding, that 
a gentleman, — and some even spoke of him by name as 
a Colonel , for some unknown purpose, was con- 
cealed in the steerage of the packet. And other appear- 
ances indicated that the affair was not entirely a secret 
even amongst the lady's servants. I recollected the story 
of Prince Cameralzaman (I believe it is) and his brother 
in the fc Arabian Nights.' But the impression there made 
was unfavorable to women generally ; whereas, with both 
of us, the story proclaimed only a moral already suffi- 



AN ADVENTURE. 89 

ciently known — that women of the highest and the lowest 
rank are alike thrown too much into situations of danger 
and temptation. 1 might mention some additional circum- 
stances of aggravation in this lady's case ; but as they 
would tend to point out the real person to those acquainted 
with her history, I shall forbear. She has since made a 
noise in the world, and has maintained, I believe, a tole- 
rably fair reputation. Soon after sunrise the next morn- 
ing, a heavenly morning of June, we dropt our anchor in 
the famous bay of Dublin. There was a dead calm : the 
sea was like a lake ; and, as we were some miles from the 
Pigeon-House, a boat was manned to put us on shore. The 
lovely lady, unaware that we were parties to her guilty 
secret, went with us, accompanied by her numerous 
attendants, and looking as beautiful, and hardly less inno- 
cent, than an angel. Long afterwards, Lord W. and I 
met her, hanging upon the arm of her husband, a manly 
and good-natured man, of polished manners, to whom she 
introduced us:, for she voluntarily challenged us as her 
fellow-voyagers, and, I suppose, had no suspicions which 
pointed in our direction. She even joined her husband in 
cordially pressing us to visit them at their magnificent 
chateau. 

Landing about three miles from Dublin, we were not 
long in reaching Sackville Street, where my friend's father 
was anxiously awaiting his son, an only child. He re- 
ceived us both with a truly paternal kindness. From this 
time, for about the five months following, during which I 
resided with my noble friends in Ireland, I saw many of 
the scenes and most of the persons that were then partic- 
ularly interesting in that country. 



• 



CHAPTER III. 

IRELAND. 

Ireland was still smoking with the embers of rebellion ; 
and Lord Cornwallis, who had been sent expressly to 
extinguish it, and was said to have fulfilled his mission 
with energy and success, was then the Lieutenant, and 
was regarded at that moment with more interest than any 
other public man. Accordingly I was not sorry when, 
two mornings after our arrival, my friend's father said to 
us at breakfast, ; Now, if you wish to see what I call a 
great man, go with me this morning, and J will take you 
to see Lord Cornwallis ; for that man, who has given 
peace both to the East and to the West, I must consider 
in the light of a great man.' We willingly accompanied 
the Earl to the Phoenix Park, where the Lord Lieutenant 
was then residing, and were privately presented to him. 
I had seen an engraving (celebrated, I believe, in its day) 
of Lord Cornwallis receiving the young Mysore princes 
as hostages at Seringapatam ; and I knew the outline of 
his public services. This gave me an additional interest 
in seeing him : but I was disappointed to find no traces in 
his mstaner of the energy and activity I presumed him to 
possess ; he seemed, on the contrary, slow or even heavy, 
but kind and benevolent in a degree which won the 

confidence at once. Him we saw often ; for Lord A 

took us with him wherever and whenever we wished ; 



IRELAND. 91 

and me in particular, it often gratified highly to see 
persons of historical names, — names, I mean, histori- 
cally connected with the great events of Elizabeth's or 
Cromwell's era, attending at the Phoenix Park. But the 
persons whom I remember most distinctly of all whom I 
was then in the habit of seeing, were Lord Clare, the 
Chancellor, the late Lord Londonderry, (then Castle- 
reagh,) at that time the Irish Chancellor of the Exche- 
quer, and the Speaker of the House of Commons, (since, 
I believe, created Lord Oriel.) With the Speaker, indeed, 

Lord A had more intimate connections than with any 

other public man ; both being devoted to the encourage- 
ment and personal superintendence of g&eat agricultural 
improvements. Both were bent on patronizing and pro- 
moting, by examples diffused extensively on their own 
estates, the introduction of English husbandry, — English 
improved breeds of cattle, — and, when it was possible, 
English capital and skill, into the rural economy of 
Ireland. Amongst the splendid spectacles I witnessed, as 
the most splendid I may mention an Installation of the 
Knights of St. Patrick. There were six knights installed 

on this occasion : one of the six was Lord A , my 

friend's father. He had no doubt received his ribbon as 
a reward for his parliamentary votes, and especially in 
the matter of the Union ; yet, from all his conversation 
upon that question, and the general conscientiousness of 
his private ltfe, I am convinced that he acted all along 
upon patriotic motives, and his real views (whether right 
or wrong) of the Irish interests. One chief reason, 
indeed, which detained us in Dublin, was the necessity of 
attending this particular Installation. At one time he 
designed to take his son and myself for the two esquires 
who attend the new made knight, according to the ritual 
of this ceremony ; but that plan was subsequently laid 




92 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

aside, on learning that the other five knights were to be 
attended by adults : and thus, from being partakers as 
actors, my friend and I became simple spectators of this 
splendid scene, which took place in the cathedral of St. 
Patrick. So easily does mere external pomp slip out of 
the memory, as to all its circumstantial items, leaving 
behind nothing beyond the general impression, that at this 
moment I remember no one incident of the whole cere- 
monial, except that some foolish person laughed aloud as 
the knights went up with their offerings to the altar, 

apparently at Lord A , who happened to be lame : a 

singular instance of levity to exhibit within the walls of 
such a building, and at the most solemn part of the whole 
ceremony. Lord W. and I sat with Lord and Lady 
Castlereagh. They were then both young, and both wore 
an impressive appearance of youthful happiness; neither, 
fortunately for their peace of mind, able to pierce that 
cloud of years, not much more than twenty, which 
divided them from the day destined in one hour to wreck 
the happiness of both. We had met both, on other 
occasions ; and their conversation, through the course of 
that day's pomps, was the most interesting circumstance 
to me, and the one I remember with most distinctness, of 
all that belonged to the Installation. By the way, I 
remember that one morning at breakfast, on occasion of 
some conversation arising about Irish Bulls, I made an 
agreement with Lord A to note down in a memo- 
randum-book every thing throughout my stay in Ireland, 
which, to my feeling as an Englishman, should seem to 
be, or to approach to a bull. And this day, at dinner, I 
reported from Lady Castlereagh's conversation, what 

struck me as a bull. Lord A laughed, and said, 

My dear X. Y. Z., I am sorry that it should so happen : 



IRELAND. 93 

your bull is certainly a bull : * but as certainly Lady C. 
is your countrywoman, and not an Irishwoman at all. 
This was a bad beginning certainly : but was Lord 

A quite accurate ? Lady C. was a daughter of 

Lord Buckinghamshire ; and "her maiden name was Lady 
E. Hobart. 

One other public scene there was about this time in 
Dublin, to the eye less captivating, but far more so in a 
moral sense. This was the final ratification of the Bill 
which united Ireland to Great Britain. I do not know 
that any one public act, or celebration, or solemnity, in 
my time, did, or could so much engage my profoundest 
sympathies. Wordsworth's fine sonnet on the extinction 
of the Venetian Republic had not then been published, 
else the last two lines would have expressed my feelings. 
After admitting that changes had taken place in Venice, 
which in a manner challenged and presumed this last and 
mortal change, the poet closes thus — 

'Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade 
Of that which once was great has pass'd away.' 

But here the previous circumstances were far different 
from those of Venice, nay opposite. There we saw a 
superannuated and paralytic State, sinking at any rate 

* The idea of a Ball is even yet undefined ; which is most extraordi- 
nary, considering that Miss Edge worth has applied all her tact and 
illustrative power, to furnish the matter for such a definition; and Mr. 
Coleridge, all his philosophic subtlety, to furnish its form. But both 
have been too fastidious in their admission of bulls. Thus, for exam- 
ple, Miss Edgeworth rejects, as no true bull, the common Joe Miller 
story, that, upon two Irishmen reaching Barnet, and being told that it 
•vas still twelve miles to London, one of them replied, — ■ Ah ! just six 
miles apac\ ) This, says Miss E , is no bull, but a sentimental remark 
on the maxim, that friendship divides our pains. Nothing of the kind : 
Miss EM ge worth cannot have understood it. The bull is a true, perfect, 
and almost ideal specimen of the genus. 



94 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

into the grave, and yielding, to the touch of military- 
violence, that only which a short lapse of years must 
inevitably have yielded to internal decay. Here, on the 
contrary, we saw a young eagle, rising into power, 
and robbed prematurely of her natural titles of honor, 
only because she did not comprehend their value, and 
because at this great crisis she had no champion. Ire- 
land, in a political sense, was surely then in her youth, 
considering the prodigious development she has since 
experienced in population, and in resources of all kinds. 

The day, the important day, had been long looked 
forward to by me : no doubt also by my young friend ; 
for he was a keen lover of Ireland, and jealous of what- 
ever appeared to touch her honor. But it was not for 
him to say anything which should seem to impeach his 
father's patriotism in voting for the Union, and promoting 
it through his borough influence. Yet oftentimes it 
seemed to me, when I introduced the subject, and sought 

to learn from Lord A the main grounds which had 

reconciled him and other men, anxious for the welfare of 
Ireland, to a measure which at least robbed her of some 
splendor, and, above all, robbed her of a name and place 
amongst the independent States of Europe, — that both 
father and son would not have been displeased, had some 
great popular violence put force upon the recorded will of 
Parliament, and compelled the two* Houses to perpetuate 
themselves. Dolorous they must of course have looked, 
in mere consistency ; but I fancied that internally they 

would have laughed. Lord A , I am certain, believed 

(as multitudes believed) that Ireland would be bettered by 
the commercial advantages conceded to her as an integral 
province of the empire, and would have benefits which, 
as an independent kingdom, she had not. I doubt not 
that this expectation was realized. But let us ask, Could 



IRELAND. 95 

not a large part of these benefits have been secured to 
Ireland, remaining as she was ? were they, in any sense, 
dependent on the sacrifice of her separate Parliament ? 
For my part I believe that Mr. Pitt's motive for insisting 
on a legislative union was, in a small proportion perhaps, 
the somewhat elevated desire to connect his own name 
with the historical changes of the empire ; to have it 
stamped, not on events so fugitive as those of war and 
peace, liable to oblivion ; but on the permanent relations 
of its integral parts. In a still larger proportion I believe 
hi& motive to have been one of pure convenience, the 
wish to exonerate himself from the intolerable vexation of 
a double Cabinet and a double Parliament. In a gov- 
ernmeut such as ours, so care-laden at any rate, it is 
certainly most harassing to have the task of soliciting a 
measure by management and influence twice over, — and 
two refractory gangs to discipline, instead of one. It 
must also be conceded that, neither management nor 
treasury influence could always avail to prevent injurious 
collisions between acts of the Irish and the British Parlia- 
ments. In Dublin, as in London, the government must 
lay its account with being occasionally out-voted ; this 
would be likely to happen peculiarly upon Irish questions. 
And acts of favor or protection, would, at times, pass, on 
behalf of Irish interests, not only clashing with more 
general ones of the central government, but indirectly 
also, [from the virtual consolidation of the Irish territory 
with the larger island since the sera of steam,] opening 
endless means for evading British acts, even within their 
own acknowledged sphere of operation. On these con- 
siderations, even an Irishman must grant that public 
convenience called for the absorption of all local or 
provincial supremacies into the central supremacy. And 
there were two brief arguments which gave weight to 



96 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

those considerations; first, that the evils likely to arise 
(and which in France have arisen) from what is termed, 
in modern politics, the principle of centralization, have 
been for us either evaded or neutralized. The provinces, 
to the very furthest nook of these ' nook-shotten ' islands, 
react upon London as powerfully as London acts upon 
them ; so that no counterpoise is required with us, as 
in France, to any inordinate influence at the centre. 
Secondly, the very pride and jealousy, which could 
dictate the retention of an independent parliament, would 
effectually preclude any modern ' Poyning's Act,' having, 
for its object, to prevent the collision of the local with the 
central government. Each would be supreme within its 
own sphere, and those spheres could not but clash. The 
separate Irish Parliament was originally no badge of 
honor or independence : it began in motives of conve- 
nience, or perhaps necessity, at a period when the com- 
munication was difficult, slow, and interrupted. A 
Parliament which arose on that footing, it was possible to 
guard by a Poyning's Act, making, in effect, all laws null, 
which should happen to contradict the supreme or central 
will. But no law, in a corresponding temper, could avail 
to limit the jurisdiction of a parliament which had been 
confessedly retained on a principle of national honor. 
Upon every consideration, therefore, of convenience, and 
for the public service generally, and for the quick 
despatch of business, the absorption of the local into the 
central parliament was now loudly called for ; and that 
Irishman only could consistently oppose the measure, who 
should take his stand upon principles transcending con- 
venience ; looking, in fact, singly to the honor and 
dignity of a country, which it was annually less absurd 
to suppose capable of an independent existence. 

Meantime, in those days, Ireland had no adequate 



IRELAND. 97 

champion : the Hoods and the Grattans were not up to 
the mark. Refractory as they were, they moved within 
the paling of order and decorum ; they were not the Titans 
for a war against the heavens. When the public feeling 
beckoned and loudly supported them, they could follow a 
lead which they appeared to head ; but they could not 
create such a body of public feeling, nor lead and head 
where they seemed to follow. Consequently, that great 
opening for a turbulent son of thunder passed unimproved ; 
and the great day drew near without symptoms of tempest. 
At last it arrived ; and I remember nothing which indi- 
cated as much ill-temper in the public mind as I have seen 
on many hundreds of occasions, trivial by comparison, in 
London. My young friend and I were determined to lose 

no part of the scene, and we went down with Lord A 

to the House. It was about the middle of the day, and a 
great mob filled the whole space about the two houses. 
As Lord A 's coach drew up to the steps of the en- 
trance, we heard a prodigious hissing and hooting ; and I 

was really agitated to think that Lord A , whom I 

loved and respected, would have to make his way through 
a tempest of public wrath ; a situation more terrific to him 
than to others, from his embarrassed walking. I found, 
however, that I might have spared my anxiety ; the subject 
of commotion was, simply, that Major Sirr, or Major Swan, 
I forget which, so celebrated in those days for their energy, 
as leaders of the police, had detected a person in the act 
of mistaking some other man's pocket handkerchief for 
his own. No storm of any kind awaited us, and yet at 
that moment there was no other arrival to divide the public 
attention ; for in order that we might see everything from 
first to last, we were amongst the very earliest parties. 
Neither did our party escape under any mistake of the 
crowd ; silence had succeeded to the uproar caused by the 



98 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

tender meeting between the thief and the Major ; and a 
man, who stood in a conspicuous situation, proclaimed 
aloud to those below him, the name or title of members as 

they entered. ' That,' said he, ' is the Earl of A ; 

the lame gentleman, I mean.' Perhaps, however, his 
knowledge did not extend so far as to the politics of a no- 
bleman who had taken no violent or factious part in public 
affairs. At least, the dreaded insults did not follow, or 
only in the very feeblest manifestations. We entered ; 
and, by way of seeing everything, we went even to the 
robing room. The man who presented his robes to Lord 

A , seemed to me, of all whom I saw on that day, the 

only one w T ho wore a face of grief : his voice and manner 
also marked a depression of spirits. But whether this 
indicated the loss of a lucrative situation, or was really 
disinterested sorrow ; and, if such, whether for a private 
loss, or out of a patriotic trouble, at the knowledge that he 
was now officiating for the last time, I cannot say. The 
House of Lords, decorated (if I remember) with hangings, 
representing the battle of the Boyne, was nearly empty 

when we entered. Lord A took this opportunity of 

explaining to us the whole course and arrangement of 
public business on ordinary occasions, and also of rehears- 
ing the chief circumstances in the coming ceremonial. 

Gradually the house filled : beautiful women sate inter- 
mingled amongst the Peers ; and, in one party of these, 
surrounded by a bevy of admirers, we saw our fair, but 
frail enchantress of the packet. She, on her part, saw and 
recognised us by an affable nod ; no stain upon her cheek, 
indicating that she suspected to what extent she was in- 
debted to our discretion ; for we had not so much as 

mentioned to Lord A the scene which chance had 

revealed to us. Then came a stir within the house, and 
an uproar resounding from without, which announced the 



IRELAND. 99 

arrival of his Excellency. Entering the house, he also, 
like the other Peers, wheeled round to the throne, and 
made to the vacant scat a profound homage. Then com- 
menced the public business, in which, if I recollect, the 
Chancellor played the most conspicuous part, — that 
Chancellor, of whom it was affirmed in those days by a 
political opponent, that he might swim in the innocent 
blood which he had caused to be shed. Then were sum- 
moned to the bar — summoned for the last time — the 
gentlemen of the House of Commons ; in the van of 
whom, and drawing all eyes upon himself, stood Lord 
Castlereagh. Then came the recitation of many acts 
passed during the session, and the sounding ratification, 
the jovial 

1 Annuit, et nutu totum tremefecit Olympiani.' 

contained in the Soit fait comme il est desire, or the more 
peremptory Le Roi le veut. At which point, in the order 
of succession, came the Royal assent to the Union Bill, I 
do not distinctly recollect. But this I do recollect — that 
no audible expression, no buzz, even, testified the feelings 
which, doubtless, lay concealed and rankling in many 
bosoms. Setting apart all public or patriotic considera- 
tions, even then I said to myself, as I surveyed the whole 
assemblage of ermined Peers — How is it, and by what 
unaccountable magic, that William Pitt can have prevailed 
on all these hereditary legislators and heads of patrician 
houses, to renounce so easily, with nothing worth the name 
of a struggle, and with no indemnification, the very bright- 
est jewel in their coronets ? This morning they all rose 
from their couches Peers of Parliament, individual pillars 
of the realm, indispensable parties to every law that is 
passed. To-morrow they will be nobody — men of straw 
— terra fdii. What madness has persuaded them to part 



100 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

with their birthright, and to cashier themselves and their 
children for ever into mere titular Lords ? As to the 
Commoners at the bar, their case was different : they had 
no life estate at all events in their honors ; and they might 
have the same chance for entering the Imperial Parliament 
amongst the hundred Irish members, as for re-entering a 
native Parliament. Neither, again, amongst the Peers was 
the case at all equal. Several of the higher had English 
titles, which would, at any rate, open the central Parliament 
to their ambition. That privilege, I believe, attached to 
Lord A . And he, in any case, from his large prop- 
erty, was tolerably sure of finding his way thither — [as 
in fact for the rest of his life he always did] — amongst 
the twenty-eight representative Peers. The wonder was 
in the case of petty and obscure Lords, who had no 
weight, personally, and none in right of their estates. Of 
these men, as they were notoriously not enriched by Mr. 
Pitt, as the distribution of honors was not very large, and 
no honor could countervail the one they lost, — of these 
men I could not, and cannot fathom the policy. Thus 
much I am sure of, — that, had such a measure been 
proposed by a political speculator previously to Queen 
Anne's reign, he would have been scouted as a dreamer 
and a visionary, who calculated upon men being generally 
somewhat worse than Esau, viz., giving up their birth- 
rights, and icithout the mess of pottage, However, on 
this memorable day, the Union was ratified ; the Bill 
received the Royal assent, without a murmur, or a whis- 
per, one way or other. Perhaps there might be a little 
pause, — a silence like that which follows an earthquake ; 
but there was no plain-spoken Lord Belhaven, as on the 
corresponding occasion in Edinburgh, to fill up the silence 
with, ' So, there's an end of an auld sang ! ' All was, or 
looked courtly, and free from vulgar emotion. One person 



IRELAND. 101 

only I remarked, whose features were suddenly illuminated 
by a smile, a sarcastic smile, as I felt it. It was Lord 
Castlereagh ; who, at the moment when the irrevocable 
words were pronounced, looked earnestly, and with a 
penetrating glance amongst a party of ladies. His own 
wife was one of the party ; but 1 did not discover the par- 
ticular object on whom his smile had settled. After this I 
had no leisure to be interested in anything which followed. 
' You are all,' thought I to myself, 6 a pack of vagabonds 
henceforward, and interlopers, with no more right to be 
here than myself.' Apparently they thought so them- 
selves ; for soon after this solemn fiat of Jove had gone 
forth, their Lordships, having no farther title to their robes, 
(for which I could not help wishing that a party of Jewish 
old clothes-men w r ould at this moment have appeared, to 
bid a shum of moneysh,) made what haste they could to 
lay them aside for ever. The House dispersed much 
more rapidly than it had assembled. Major Sirr was 
found outside, just where we left him, laying down the 
law (as before) about pocket-handkerchiefs to old and 
young practitioners ; and all parties adjourned to find 
what consolation they might in the great evening event of 
dinner. 

Thus we were set at liberty from Dublin. Parliaments 
and installations, and masqued balls, with all other secon- 
dary splendors in celebration of original splendors, at 
length had ceased to shine upon the Irish metropolis. The 
c season,' as it is called in great cities, was over ; unfortu- 
nately the last season of all that were ever destined to 
illuminate the society, or to stimulate the domestic trade 
of Dublin. It began to be thought scandalous to be found 
in town : nobody, in fact, remained, except some two 
hundred thousand people, who never did, nor ever would, 
wear ermine ; and in all Ireland there remained nothing 



102 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

at all to attract, except that which no King, and no two 
Houses can, by any conspiracy, abolish, viz., the beauty 
of her most verdant scenery. I speak of that part which 
chiefly it is that I know, — the scenery of the west, — 
Connaught, especially ; and in Connaught, especially 
Mayo. There it was, and in the county next adjoining, 

that Lord A 's large estates were situated ; the family 

mansion and beautiful park being in Mayo. Thither, as 
nothing else now remained to divert us from what, in fact, 
we had thirsted for throughout the heats of summer, and 
throughout the magnificences of the capital, at length we 
set off by slow and very circuitous movements. Making 
but short journeys on each day, and resting always at the 
house of some private friend, I thus obtained an opportu- 
nity of seeing the old Irish nobility and gentry more 
extensively, and on a more intimate footing than I had 
hoped for. No experience, in my whole life, so much 
interested, or so much surprised me. In a little work, not 
much known, of Suetonius, the most interesting record 
which survives of the early Roman literature, [De illus- 
tribus Grammaticis,~] it comes out incidentally that many 
books, many idioms, and verbal peculiarities belonging to 
the primitive ages of Roman culture, were to be found 
still lingering in the old Roman settlements, both Gaulish 
and Spanish, long after they had become obsolete (and 
sometimes unintelligible) in Rome. From the tardiness 
and the difficulty of communication, the want of newspa- 
pers, &c, it followed naturally enough that the distant 
provincial towns, though not without their literature and 
their literary professors, were always one or two genera- 
tions in the rear of the metropolis ; and thus it happened, 
that, about the time of Augustus, there were some gram- 
matici in Rome, answering to our black-letter critics, who 
sought the material of their researches in Boulogne [Ges- 



IRELAND. 103 

soriacum,'] in Aries, [Are! at a,] or in Marseilles, [Mas- 
silia.] Now, the old Irish nobility — that part I mean 
which might be called the rural nobility — stood in the 
same relation to English manners and customs. Here 
might be found old rambling houses, in the style of antique 
English manorial chateaux, ill planned, as regarded con- 
venience and economy, with long rambling galleries, and 
1 passages that lead to nothing,' windows innumerable, 
that evidently had never looked for that severe audit to 
which they were summoned by William Pitt ; not unfre- 
quently with a traditional haunted bed-chamber ; but 
displaying, in the dwelling-rooms, a comfort and c cozi- 
ness' not so effectually attained in modern times. Here 
were old libraries, old butlers, and old customs, that seemed 
all alike to belong to the era of Cromwell, or even an earlier 
era than his ; whilst the ancient names, to one who was 
tolerably familiar with the great events of Irish history, 
often strengthened the illusion. Not that I could pretend 
to be familiar with Irish history as Irish ; but as a con- 
spicuous chapter in the difficult policy of Queen Elizabeth, 
of Charles I., and of Cromwell, nobody who had read the 
English history could be a stranger to the O'Niells, the 
O'Donnels, the Ormonds, [i. e. the Butlers,] the Inchi- 
quins, or the De Burghs. I soon found in fact that the 
aristocracy of Ireland might be divided into two great 
sections — the native Irish — those who might be viewed 
as territorial fixtures ; and those who spent so much of 
their time and revenues at Bath, Cheltenham, Weymouth, 
London, &c, as to have become almost entirely English. 
It was the former whom we chiefly visited ; and I remarked 
that, in the midst of hospitality the most unbounded, and 
the amplest comfort, some of these were in the rear of the 
English commercial gentry, as to modern refinements of 
luxury. There was, at the same time, an apparent 






104 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

strength of character, as if formed amidst turbulent 
scenes, and a raciness of manner, which interested me 
profoundly, and impressed themselves on my recollec- 
tion. 

In our road to Mayo, we were often upon ground ren- 
dered memorable not only by historical events, but more 
recently by the disastrous scenes of the rebellion, by its 

horrors or its calamities. On reaching W House, 

we found ourselves in situations and a neighborhood which 
had become the very centre of the final military opera- 
tions, which had succeeded to the main rebellion, and 
which, to the people of England, and still more to the 
people of the Continent, had offered a character of interest 
wanting to the inartificial movements of Father Roche 
and Bagenal Harvey. About two months after the 
great defeat and subsequent dispersion of the rebel 
army, amounting, perhaps, to 25,000 men, with a consid- 
erable though small artillery, at Vinegar Hill, a French 
force of about 900 men had landed on the western 
coast, and again stirred up the Irish to insurrection. Had 
the descent been in time to co-operate with the insurgents 
of Wexford, Kildare, and Wicklow, it would have organ- 
ized the powerful materials of revolt, in a way calculated 
to distress the Government, and to perplex it in a memor- 
able degree. There cannot be a doubt, considering the 
misconduct of the royal army, in all its branches, at that 
period of imperfect discipline, that' Ireland would have 
been lost for a time. Whether the French Government, 
considering the feebleness and insufficiency of the Direc- 
tory, would have improved the opportunity, is doubtful. 
It is also doubtful whether, under a government of greater 
energy, our naval vigilance would not have intercepted or 
overtaken any expedition upon a sufficient scale. But it 
is certain that, had the same opening presented itself to 



IRELAND. 105 

the energy of Napoleon, it would have been followed up 
at whatever sacrifice of men, shipping, or stores. 

I was naturally led, by hearing on every side the con- 
versation reverting to the dangers and tragic incidents of 
the era, separated from us by not quite two years, to 
make inquiries of everybody who had personally partici- 
pated in the commotions. Records there were on every 
side, and memorials even in our bed-rooms, of the visit of 

the French ; for they had occupied W House in some 

strength. The largest town in our neighborhood was 
Castlebar, distant about eleven Irish miles. To this it 
was that the French addressed their very earliest efforts. 
Advancing rapidly, and with their usual style of affected 
confidence, they had obtained at first a degree of success 
which was almost surprising to their own insolent vanity, 
and which was long afterwards a subject of bitter mortifi- 
cation to our own army. Had there been at this point 
any energy at all corresponding to that of the enemy, or 
commensurate to the intrinsic superiority of our own 
troops as to real courage, the French would have been 
compelled to lay down their arms. The experience of 
those days, however, showed how deficient is the finest 
composition of an army, unless when its martial qualities 
have been developed by practice ; and how liable is all 
courage, when utterly inexperienced, to sudden panics. 
This gasconading advance, which would have foundered 
entirely against a single battalion of the troops which 
fought in 1812- 13 amongst the Pyrenees, was here com- 
pletely successful. 

The Bishop of this See, Dr. Stock, with his whole 
household, and, indeed, his whole pastoral charge, became 
on this occasion prisoners to the French. The head- 
quarters were fixed for a time in the Episcopal Palace : 
the French Commander-in-chief, General Humbert, and 
8 



106 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

his staff, lived in the house, and maintained a daily inter- 
course with the Bishop ; who thus became well fitted to 
record (which he soon afterwards did in an anonymous 
pamphlet) the leading circumstances of the French incur- 
sion, and the consequent insurrection in Connaught, as 
well as the most striking features in the character and 
deportment of the Republican officers. Riding over the 
scene of these transactions daily for some months, in 

company with the Dean of F , whose sacred character 

had not prevented him from taking that military part 
which seemed, in those difficult moments, a duty of ele- 
mentary patriotism laid upon all alike, — =1 enjoyed many 
opportunities for correcting or verifying the statements of 
the worthy Bishop, and of collecting anecdotes of interest. 
The small body of French troops, which undertook this 
remote service, had been detached in one-half from the 
army of the Rhine ; the other half had served under 
Napoleon in his first foreign campaign — the brilliant one 
of 1796, which accomplished the conquest of northern 
Italy. Those from Germany showed, by their looks and 
their meagre condition, how much they had suffered ; and 
some of them, in describing their hardships, told their 
Irish acquaintance that, during the siege of Mentz, which 
had occurred in the previous winter of 1797, they had 
slept in holes made four feet below the surface of the 
snow. One officer declared solemnly that he had not 
once undressed, further than by taking off his coat, for a 
period of twelve months. The private soldiers had all 
the essential qualities fitting them for a difficult and trying 
service : l intelligence, activity, temperance, patience to a 
surprising degree, together with the exactest discipline.' 
This is the statement of their truly candid and upright 
enemy. c Yet,' says the Bishop, with all these martial 
qualities, ' if you except the grenadiers, they had nothing 



IRELAND. 107 

to catch the eye. Their stature, for the most part, was 
low, their complexion pale and yellow, their clothes much 
the worse for wear ; to a superficial observer, they would 
have appeared incapable of enduring any hardship. These 
were the men, however, of whom it was presently ob- 
served, that they could be well content to live on bread 
or potatoes, to drink water, to make the stones of the 
street their bed, and to sleep in their clothes, with no 
covering but the canopy of heaven.' 

It may well be imagined in what terror the families of 
Killala heard of a French invasion, and the necessity of 
immediately receiving a republican army. Sansculottes, 
as these men were, all over Europe they had the reputa- 
tion of pursuing a ferocious marauding policy ; in fact 
they were held little better than sanguinary brigands. In 
candor, it must be admitted that their conduct at Killala 
belied these reports ; though, on the other hand, an ob- 
vious interest obliged them to a more pacific demeanor in 
a land which they saluted as friendly and designed to 
raise into extensive insurrection. The French army, so 
much dreaded, at length arrived. The General and his 
staff entered the palace ; and the first act of one officer, 
on coming into the dining-room, was to advance to the 
sideboard, sweep all the plate into a basket, and deliver it 
to the Bishop's butler, with a charge to carry it off to a 
place of security. 

The French officers, with the detachment left under 
their orders by the Commander-in-chief, stayed about 
one month at Killala. This period allowed opportunities 
enough for observing individual differences of character^ 
and the general tone of their manners. These opportuni- 
ties were not thrown away upon the Bishop ; he noticed 
with a critical eye, and he recorded on the spot, whatever 
fell within his own experience. Had he, however, hap- 



108 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

pened to be a political or courtier Bishop, his record 
would, perhaps, have been suppressed ; and at any rate 
it would have been colored by prejudice. As it was, I 
believe it to have been the perfectly honest testimony of 
an honest man ; and, considering the minute circumstan- 
tiality of its delineations, I do not believe that, throughout 
the whole revolutionary war, any one document was made 
public which throws so much light on the quality and 
composition of the French Republican armies. On this 
consideration I shall extract a few passages from the 
Bishop's personal sketches ; a thing which I should not 
have done but for two reasons ; first, that the original 
pamphlet is now forgotten, though so well worthy of 
preservation ; secondly, that my own information from 

the Hon. D B , and from the Dean of F , 

who both rode with his Majesty's cavalry during that 
service, and personally witnessed many of the most im- 
portant scenes in that local insurrection of Connaught, as 
well as in the furious and more national insurrection 
which had terminated in effect at Vinegar Hill, enabled 
me to check the Bishop's statements. It was upon the 
very estates of these gentlemen, or of their nearest rela- 
tives, that the French had planted their garrisons ; and 

the Deanery of F was not above six miles from 

Enniscorthy, close to which was the encampment of 
Vinegar Hill : so that both enjoyed unexampled opportu- 
nities for observing the most circumstantial features in 
each field of these two local wars. 

The Commander-in-chief of the French armament is 
thus delineated by the Bishop : — 

c Humbert, the leader of this singular body of men, 
was himself as extraordinary a personage as any in his 
army. Of a good height and shape, in the full vigor of 
life, prompt to decide, quick in execution, apparently 



IRELAND. 109 

master of his art, you could not refuse him the praise of 
a good officer, while his physiognomy forbade you to like 
him as a man. His eye, which was small and sleepy, 
(the effect, perhaps, of much watching,) cast a sidelong 
glance of insidiousness and even of cruelty ; it was the 
eye of a cat preparing to spring upon her prey. His 
education and manners were indicative of a person sprung 
from the lower orders of society, though he knew how to 
assume, when it was convenient, the deportment of a 
gentleman. For learning, he had scarcely enough to 
enable him to write his name. His passions were furious ; 
and all his behavior seemed marked with the character of 
roughness and insolence. A narrower observation of 
him, however, seemed to discover that much of this 
roughness was the result of art, being assumed with the 
view of extorting by terror a ready compliance with his 
commands. Of this truth the Bishop himself was one of 
the first who had occasion to be made sensible.' 

The particular occasion here alluded to by the Bishop, 
arose out of the first attempts to effect the disembarkation 
of the military stores and equipments from the French 
shipping, as also to forward them when landed. The 
case was one of extreme urgency ; and proportionate 
allowance must be made for the French General. Every 
moment might bring the British cruisers in sight — two 
important expeditions had already been baffled in that 
way — and the absolute certainty, known to all parties 
alike, that delay, under these circumstances, was tanta- 
mount to ruin, that upon a difference of ten or fifteen 
minutes, this way or that, might happen to hinge the 
whole issue of the expedition ; — this consciousness, I say, 
gave, unavoidably to every demur at this critical moment, 
the color of treachery. Neither boats, nor carts, nor 
horses, could be obtained ; the owners most imprudently 



110 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

and selfishly retiring from that service. Such being the 
extremity, the French General made the Bishop respon- 
sible for the execution of his orders : the Bishop had 
really no means to enforce his commission, and failed. 
Upon this General Humbert threatened to send his Lord- 
ship, together with his whole family, prisoners of war 
to France, and assumed the air of a man violently pro- 
voked. Here came the crisis for determining the Bishop's 
weight amongst his immediate flock, and his hold upon 
their affections. One great Bishop, not far off, would, on 
such a trial, have been exultingly consigned, to his fate : 
that I well know ; for Lord W. and I, merely as his 
visiters, were attacked so fiercely with stones, that we 
were obliged to forbear going out, unless in broad day- 
light. Luckily the Bishop of Killala had shown himself 
a Christian pastor, and now he reaped the fruits of his 
goodness. The public selfishness gave way, when the 
danger of the Bishop was made known. The boats, the 
carts, the horses, were now liberally brought in from their 
lurking places ; the artillery and stores were landed ; and 
the drivers of the carts, &c. were paid in drafts upon the 
Irish Directory, which (if it were an aerial coin) served at 
least to mark an unwillingness in the enemy to adopt 
violent modes of hostility, and ultimately became available 
in the very character assigned to them by the French 
General ; not, indeed, as drafts upon the Rebel, but as 
claims upon the equity of the English Government. 

The officer left n command at Killala, when the pres- 
ence of the Commander-in-chief was required elsewhere, 
bore the name of Charost. He was a lieutenant-colonel, 
aged forty-five years, the son of a Parisian watchmaker. 
Having been sent over at an early age, to the unhappy 
island of St. Domingo, with a view to some connections 
there by which he hoped to profit, he had been fortunate 



IRELAND. Ill 

enough to marry a young woman, who brought him a 
plantation for her dowry, which was reputed to have 
yielded him a revenue of =£2000 sterling per annum. 
But this, of course, all went to wreck in one day, upon 
that mad decree of the French Convention, which pro- 
claimed liberty, without distinction, without restrictions, 
and without gradations, to the unprepared and ferocious 
negroes. Even his wife and daughter would have per- 
ished simultaneously with his property, but for English 
protection, which delivered them from the black sabre, 
and transferred them to Jamaica. There, however, though 
safe, they were, as respected Colonel Charost, unavoidably 
captives ; and c his eyes w r ould fill,' says the Bishop, 
4 when he told the family that he had not seen these dear 
relatives for six years past, nor even had tidings of them 
for the last three years.' On his return to France, find- 
ing that to have been a watchmaker's son was no longer 
a bar to the honors of the military profession, he had en- 
tered the army, and had risen by merit to the rank which 
he now r held. ' He had a plain, good understanding. He 
seemed careless or doubtful of revealed religion ; but said 
that he believed in God ; was inclined to think that there 
must be a future state ; and was very sure, that, while he 
lived in this world, it was his duty to do all the good to his 
fellow-creatures that he could. Yet what he did not 
exhibit in his own conduct he appeared to respect in 
others ; for he took care that no noise nor disturbance 
should be made in the castle {i. e. the Bishop's palace) 
on Sundays, while the family, and many Protestants from 
the town, were assembled in the library at their devotions. 
4 Boudet, the next in command, was a captain of foot, 
twenty-eight years old. His father, he said, was still liv- 
ing, though sixty-seven years old when he was born. His 
height was six feet two inches. In person, complexion, 



112 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

and gravity, he was no inadequate representation of the 
Knight of La Mancha, whose example he followed in a 
recital of his own prowess and wonderful exploits, de- 
livered in measured language, and an imposing serious- 
ness of aspect.' The Bishop represents him as vain and 
irritable, but distinguished by good feeling and principle. 
Another officer was Ponson, described as five feet six 
inches high, lively and animated in excess, volatile, noisy, 
and chattering, a Voutrance. ' He was hardy,' says the 
Bishop, l and patient to admiration of labor and want of 
rest.' And of this last quality the following wonderful 
illustration is given : — 'A continued watching of five 
days and nights together, when the rebels were growing 
desperate for prey and mischief, did not appear to sink 
Tiis spirits in the smallest degree? This particular sort of 
strength has nothing in common with strength of muscle : 
I shall have occasion to notice it again in some remarks,, 
which I may venture to style important, on the secret of 
happiness, so far as it depends upon physical means. 
The power of supporting long vigils is connected closely 
with diet. A few great truths on that subject, little known 
to men in general, are capable of making a revolution in 
human welfare. For it is undeniable that a sane state of 
the animal nature is the negative condition of happiness : 
that is to say, such a condition being present, happiness 
will not follow as the inevitable result; but, in the absence 
of such a condition, it is inevitable that there will be no 
happiness. 

Contrasting with the known and well-established ra- 
pacity of the French army in all its ranks, (not excepting 
those who have the decoration of the Legion of Honor,) 
the severe honesty of these particular officers, we must 
come to the conclusion that they had been selected for 
their tried qualities of abstinence and self-control. Of 



IRELAND. 113 

this same Ponson, the last-described, the Bishop declares 
that ' he was strictly honest, and could not bear the ab- 
sence of this quality in others ; so that his patience was 
pretty well tried by his Irish allies.' At the same time, 
he expressed his contempt for religion, in a way which 
the Bishop saw reason for ascribing to vanity — ; the 
miserable affectation of appearing worse than he really 
was.' One officer there was, named True, whose brutal- 
ity recalled the impression, so disadvantageous to French 
republicanism, which else had been partially effaced by 
the manners and conduct of his comrades. To him the 
Bishop (and not the Bishop only, but every one of my 
own informants, to whom True had been familiarly 
known) ascribes ' a front of brass, an incessant fraudful 
smile, manners altogether vulgar, and in his dress and 
person a neglect of cleanliness, even beyond the affected 
negligence of republicans.' 

True, however, happily, was not leader ; and the prin- 
ciples or the policy of his superiors prevailed. To them, 
not merely in their own conduct, but also in their way of 
applying that influence which they held over their very 
bigoted allies, the Protestants of Connaught were under 
deep obligations. Speaking merely as to property, the 
honest Bishop renders the following justice to the enemy : 
— ' And here it would be an act of great injustice to the 
excellent discipline constantly maintained by these inva- 
ders while they remained in our town, — not to remark 
that, with every temptation to plunder, which the time and 
the number of valuable articles within their reach pre- 
sented to them in the Bishop's palace, from a sideboard of 
plate and glasses, a hall filled with hats, whips, and great- 
coats, as well of the guests as of the family, not a single 
particular of private property was found to have been 
carried away, when the owners, after the first fright, came 



114 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

to look for their effects, which was not for a day or two 
after the landing.' Even in matters of delicacy the same 
forbearance was exhibited : — ; Beside the entire use of 
other apartments, during the stay of the French in Killala, 
the attic story, containing a library, and three bed-cham- 
bers, continued sacred to the Bishop and his family. And 
so scrupulous was the delicacy of the French, not to dis- 
turb the female part of the house, that not one of them 
was ever seen to go higher than the middle floor, except 
on the evening of the success at Castlebar, when two of- 
ficers begged leave to carry to the family the news of the 
battle ; and seemed a little mortified that the news was 
received with an air of dissatisfaction.'' These, however, 
were not the weightiest instances of that eminent service 
which the French had it in their power to render on this 
occasion. The Royal army behaved ill in every sense. 
Liable to continual panics in the field, panics which, but 
for the overwhelming force accumulated, and the dis- 
cretion of Lord Cornwallis, would have been fatal to the 
good cause, the Royal forces erred, as unthinkingly, in 
the abuse of any momentary triumph. Forgetting that 
the rebels held many hostages in their hands, they once 
recommenced the old system practised in Wexford and 
Kildare, of hanging and shooting without trial, and with- 
out a thought of the horrible reprisals that might be 
adopted. These reprisals, but for the fortunate influence 
of the French commanders, and but for their great energy 
in applying that influence according to the exigencies of 
time and place, would have been made : it cost the whole 
weight of the French power ; their influence was stretched 
almost to breaking, before they could accomplish the pur- 
pose of neutralizing the senseless cruelty of the Royalists, 
and of saving the trembling Protestants. Dreadful were 
the anxieties of those moments : and I myself heard per- 



IRELAND. 115 

sons, at a distance of nearly two years, declare that their 
lives hung at that time by a thread ; and that, but for the 
hasty approach of the Lord Lieutenant by forced marches, 
that thread would have snapped. c We heard with panic,' 
said they, ' of the madness which characterized the pro- 
ceedings of our soi-disant friends : we looked for any 
chance of safety only to our nominal enemies, the staff of 
the French army.' 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE IRISH REBELLION. 

One story was still current, and very frequently re- 
peated, at the time of my own residence upon the scene 
of these transactions. It would not be fair to mention it 
without saying, at the same time, that the Bishop, whose 
discretion was so much impeached by the affair, had the 
candor to blame himself most heavily, and always ap- 
plauded the rebel for the lesson he had given him ; but 
still it serves to show the contagiousness of that blind 
spirit of aristocratic haughtiness which then animated the 
Royal party. The case was this : — Day after day the 
Royal forces had been accumulating upon military posts 
in the neighborhood of Killala, and could be descried from 
elevated stations in that town. Stories travelled simulta- 
neously to Killala, every hour, of the atrocities which 
marked their advance ; many, doubtless, being fictitious, 
either of blind hatred, or of that ferocious policy which 
sought to make the rebels desperate, by involving them in 
the last extremities of guilt and massacre ; but, unhappily, 
too much countenanced as to their general outline, by 
excesses on the Royal part, already proved, and undenia- 
ble. The ferment and the agitation increased every hour 
amongst the rebel occupants of Killala. The French had 
no power to protect, beyond the moral one of their in- 



THE IRISH REBELLION. 117 

fluence as allies ; and in the very crisis of this alarming 
situation, a rebel came to the Bishop with the news that 
the Royal cavalry was at that moment advancing from 
Sligo, and could be traced along the country by the line 
of blazing houses which accompanied their march. The 
Bishop, of course, doubted, — could not believe, and so 
forth. 6 Come with me,' said the rebel. It was a matter 
of policy to yield, and his Lordship w r ent. They ascended 
together the Needle-tower-hill, from the summit of which 
the Bishop now discovered that the fierce rebel had spoken 
but too truly. A line of smoke and fire ran over the 
country in the rear of a strong patrol detached from the 
King's forces. The moment was critical ; the rebel's eye 
expressed the unsettled state of his feelings ; and, at that 
instant, the imprudent Bishop uttered a sentiment which, 
to his dying day he could not forget. fc They,' said he, 
meaning the ruined houses, 6 they are only wretched 
cabins.' The rebel mused, and for a few moments 
seemed in self-conflict : a dreadful interval to the Bishop, 
who became sensible of his own extreme imprudence the 
very moment after the words had escaped him. However, 
the man contented himself with saying, after a pause, — 
'A poor man's cabin is to him as valuable as a palace.' 
It is probable that this retort was far from expressing the 
deep moral indignation at his heart, though his readiness 
of mind failed to furnish him with one more stinging. 
And in such cases all depends upon the first movement of 
vindictive feeling being broken. The Bishop, however, 
did not forget the lesson he had received, nor did he fail 
to blame himself most heavily, — not so much for his 
imprudence, as for his thoughtless adoption of a language 
expressing an aristocratic hauteur, which did not belong to 
his real character. There was indeed at that moment no 
need that fresh fuel should be applied to the irritation of 



118 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

the rebels^ they had already declared their intention of 
plundering the town : and, as they added, ■ in spite of the 
French.' whom they now regarded and openly denounced 
as ■ abettors of the Protestants.' much more than as their 
own allies. 

Justice, however, must be done to the rebels as well as 
to their military associates. If they were disposed to 
plunder, they were found uniformly to shrink from blood- 
shed and cruelty : and yet from no want of energy or 
determination. l The peasantry never appeared to want 
animal courage,' says the Bishop, ' for they flocked to- 
gether to meet danger whenever it was expected. Had 
it pleased Heaven to be as liberal to them of brains as of 
hands, it is not easy to say to what length of mischief they 
might have proceeded ; but they were all along unpro- 
vided with leaders of any ability.' This is true : and yet 
it would be doing poor justice to the Connaught rebels, nor 
would it be drawing the moral truly as respects this aspect 
of the rebellion, if their abstinence from mischief, in its 
worst form, were to be explained out of this defect in their 
leaders. Nor is it possible to suppose this the Bishop's 
meaning, though his words seem to tend that way. For 
he himself elsewhere notices the absence of all wanton 
bloodshed, as a feature of this Connaught rebellion, most 
honorable in itself to the poor misguided rebels, and as 
distinguishing it very remarkably from the greater insur- 
rection so recently crushed in the centre and the east. 
' It is a circumstance, 1 says he, 4 worthy of particular no- 
tice, that, during the whole time of this civil commotion, 
not a single drop of blood was shed by the Connaught 
rebels, except in the field of war. It is true the example 
and influence of the French went a great way to prevent 
sanguinary excesses. But it will not be deemed fair to 
ascribe to this cause alone the forbearance of which we 



THE IRISH REBELLION. 119 

were witnesses, when it is considered what a range of 
country lay at the mercy of the rebels for several days 
after the French power was known to be at an end.' 

To what then are we to ascribe the forbearance of the 
Connaught men, so singularly contrasted with the hideous 
excesses of their brethren in the east ? Solely to the 
different complexion of the policy pursued by Government. 
In Wexford, Kildare, Meath, Dublin, &c, it had been 
judged advisable to adopt, as a sort of precautionary 
police, not for the punishment, but for the discovery of 
rebellious purposes, measures of the direst severity ; not 
merely free-quarterings of the soldiery, with liberty (or 
even an express commission) to commit outrages and 
insults upon all who were suspected, upon all who refused 
to countenance such measures, upon all who presumed to 
question their justice ; but, even under color of martial 
law, to inflict croppings and pitch-cappings, half-hangings, 
and the torture of the picketings ; to say nothing of houses 
burnt, and farms laid waste, things which were done daily 
and under military orders ; the purpose avowed being 
either vengeance for some known act of insurrection, or 
the determination to extort confessions. Too often, how- 
ever, as may well be supposed, in such utter disorganiza- 
tion of society, private malice, on account of old family 
feuds, was the true principle at work. And many were 
thus driven by mere frenzy of just indignation, or, per- 
haps, by mere desperation, into acts of rebellion which 
else they had not meditated. Now, in Connaught at this 
time, the same barbarous policy was no longer pursued ; 
and then it was seen, that, unless maddened by ill-usage, 
the peasantry were capable of the very fullest self-control. 
There was no repetition of the Enniscorthy massacres; 
and it was impossible to explain honestly why there was 



120 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

none, without, at the same time, reflecting back upon that 
atrocity some color of palliation. 

These things duly considered, it must be granted that 
there was a spirit of unjustifiable violence in the Royal 
army on achieving their triumph. It is shocking, however, 
to observe the effect of panic, to excite and irritate the 
instincts of cruelty and sanguinary violence, even in the 
gentlest minds. I remember well, on occasion of the 
memorable tumults in Bristol, (autumn of 1831,) that I, 
for my part, could not read, without horror and indigna- 
tion, one statement made, I believe, officially at that time, 
which yet won the cordial approbation of some ladies who 
had participated in the panic. I allude to that part of the 
report which represents several of the dragoons as having 
dismounted, resigned the care of their horses to persons in 
the street, and pursued the unhappy fugitives from the 
mob, up stairs and down stairs, to the last nook of their 
retreat. The worst criminals could not be known as such; 
and, even allowing that they could, vengeance so hellish 
and so unrelenting was not justified by houses burned or 
by momentary panics raised. Scenes of the same de- 
scription were beheld upon the first triumph of the Royal 
cause in Connaught ; and but for Lord Cornwallis, equally 
firm before his success and modprate in its exercise, they 
would have prevailed more extensively. The poor rebels 
were pursued with a needless ferocity on the re-capture of 
Killala. So hotly, indeed, did some of the conquerors 
hang upon the footsteps of the fugitives, that both rushed 
almost simultaneously, pursuers and pursued, into the 
terror-stricken houses of Killala : and in some instances 
the ball meant for a rebel, told with mortal effect upon a 
loyalist. Here, indeed, as in other cases of this rebellion, 
in candor it should be mentioned, that the Royal army 
was composed chiefly of militia regiments. The Bishop 



THE IRISH REBELLION. 121 

of Killala was assured by an intelligent officer of the 
King's army, that the victors were within a trifle of being 
beaten. I was myself told by a gentleman, who rode as a 
volunteer on that day, that, to the best of his belief, it was 
merely a mistaken order of the rebel chiefs, causing a 
false application of a select reserve at a very critical 
moment, which had saved his own party from a decisive 
repulse. It may be added, upon almost universal testi- 
mony, that the re-capture of Killala was abused, not only 
as respected the defeated rebels, but also as respected the 
loyalists of that town. ' The regiments that came to their 
assistance, being all militia, seemed to think that they had 
a right to take the property they had been the means of 
preserving, and to use it as their own whenever they stood 
in need of it. Their rapacity differed in no respect from 
that of the rebels, except that they seized upon things 
with less of ceremony and excuse, and that his Majesty's 
soldiers were incomparably superior to the Irish traitors 
in dexterity at stealing. In consequence, the town grew 
very weary of their guests, and were glad to see them 
march off to other quarters.' 

The military operations in this brief campaign were 
discreditable, in the last degree, to the energy, to the vigi- 
lance, and to the steadiness of the Orange army. Hum- 
bert had been a leader against the royalists of La Vendee, 
as well as on the Rhine ; consequently he was an ambidex- 
trous enemy — fitted equally for partisan warfare, and the 
tactics of regular armies. Keenly alive to the necessity 
under his circumstances of vigor and despatch, after occu- 
pying Killala on the evening of the 22d August, (the day 
of his disembarkation,) where the small garrison of 50 
men, (yeomen and fencibles) had made a tolerable resist- 
ance ; and after other trifling affairs, on the 26th, he had 
inarched against Castlebar, with about 800 of his own men, 
9 



122 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

and 1500 or 1000 of the rebels. Here was the advanced 
post of the Royal army. General Lake, (the Lord Lake 
of India,) and Major General Hutchinson, (the Lord 
Hutchinson of Egypt,) had assembled upon this point a 
respectable force ; some say upwards of 4000, others not 
more than 1100; I heard from what may be considered 
respectable eye-witnesses, that the whole amount might be 
reckoned fairly at 2500. The disgraceful result is well 
known : the French, marching all night over mountain 
roads, and through one pass which was thought impreg- 
nable, if it had been occupied by a battalion, instead of a 
captain's guard, surprised Castlebar on the morning of the 
27th. I say ; surprised,' for no word, short of that, can 
express the circumstances of the case. About two o'clock 
in the morning, a courier had brought intelligence of the 
French advance ; but from some unaccountable obstinacy 
at head -quarters, such as had proved fatal more than either 
once or twice in the Wexford campaign, his news was dis- 
believed ; yet, if disbelieved, why, therefore, neglected? 
Neglected, however it was ; and at seven, when the news 
was found to be true, the Royal army was drawn out in 
hurry and confusion to meet the enemy. The French, on 
their part, seeing our strength, looked for no better result 
for themselves than summary surrender, more especially 
as our artillery was well served, and soon began to tell 
upon their ranks. Better hopes first arose, as they after- 
wards declared, upon observing that many of the troops 
fired in a disorderly way, without waiting for the word of 
command ; upon this they took new measures : in a few 
minutes a panic arose ; and, in spite of all that could be 
done by the officers, the whole army ran. General Lake 
ordered a retreat ; and then the flight became irretrievable. 
The troops reached Tuam, thirty miles distant, on that same 
day ; and one small party of mounted men actually pushed 



THE IRISH REBELLION. 123 

on the next morning to Athlone, which is above sixty 
miles from Castlebar. Fourteen pieces of artillery were 
lost on this occasion. However, it ought to be mentioned 
that some serious grounds appeared afterwards for sus- 
pecting treachery : most of those who had been reported 
4 missing,' on this first battle, having been afterwards 
observed in the ranks of the enemy, — where it is remark- 
able enough, (or perhaps it argues that not being fully 
relied on by their new allies, they were put forward on the 
most dangerous services,) all of these deserters perished 
to a man. Meantime, the new Lord Lieutenant, having 
his foot constantly in the stirrup, marched from Dublin 
without a moment's delay. By means of the grand canal, 
he made a forced march of fifty-six English miles in two 
days ; which brought him to Kilbeggan on the 27th. Very 
early on the following morning he received the unpleasant 
news from Castlebar. Upon this he advanced to Athlone, 
meeting every indication of a routed and panic-struck 
army. Lord Lake was retreating upon that town, and 
thought himself so little secure, even at this distance from 
the enemy, that the road from Tuam was covered with 
strong patrols. Meantime, in ludicrous contrast to these 
demonstrations of alarm, the French had never stirred an 
inch from Castlebar. On the 4th of September, Lord 
Cornwallis was within fourteen miles of that place. Hum- 
bert, however, had previously dislodged towards the county 
of Longford. His motive for this movement was to co- 
operate with an insurrection in that quarter, which had just 
then broken out in strength. He was now, however, 
hemmed in by a large army of perhaps 25,000 men, 
advancing from all points, a few moves w T ere all that 
remained of the game, played with whatever skill. 
Colonel Vereker, with about 300 of the Limerick militia, 
first came up with him, and skirmished very creditably, 



124 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

(September 6,) with part, or (as the Colonel always main- 
tained) with the whole of the French army. Other affairs 
of trivial importance followed ; and at length on the 6th 
of September, General Humbert surrendered with his 
whole army, now reduced to 844 men, of whom 96 were 
officers, having lost, since their landing at Killala, exactly 
288 men. The rebels were not admitted to any terms ; 
they were pursued and cut down without mercy. How- 
ever, it is pleasant to know, that from their agility in 
escaping, this cruel policy was defeated : not much above 
500 perished : and thus were secured to the Royal party 
the worst results of vengeance the fiercest, and clemency 
the most undistinguishing, without any one advantage of 
either. Some districts, as Laggan and Eris, were treated 
with martial rigor : the cabins being burned, and their 
unhappy tenants driven out into the mountains for the 
winter. Rigor, therefore, there was ; for the most 
humane politicians, erroneously as I conceive, believed it 
necessary for the army to leave behind some impressions 
of terror amongst the insurgents. It is certain, however, 
that under the counsels of Lord Cornwallis, the standards 
of public severity were very much lowered, as compared 
with the previous examples in Wexford. 

The tardiness and slovenly execution of the whole ser- 
vice, meantime, was well illustrated in what follows : — 

Killala was not delivered from rebel hands until the 23d 
of September, notwithstanding the general surrender had 
occurred on the 8th, and then only in consequence of an 
express from the Bishop to General Trench, hastening his 
march. The situation of the Protestants was indeed criti- 
cal. Humbert had left three French officers to protect the 
place, but their influence gradually had sunk to a mere 
shadow. And plans of pillage, with all its attendant hor- 
rors, were daily debated. Under these circumstances, the 



THE IRISH REBELLION. 125 

French officers behaved honorably and courageously. 
c Yet,' says the Bishop, ' the poor commandant had no 
reason to be pleased with the treatment he had received 
immediately after the action. He had returned to the 
castle for his sabre, and advanced with it to the gate, in 
order to deliver it up to some English officer, when it was 
seized and forced from his hand by a common soldier of 
Fraser's. He came in, got another sword, which he sur- 
rendered to an officer, and turned to re-enter the hall. At 
this moment a second Highlander burst through the gate, 
in spite of the sentinel placed there by the General, and 
fired at the commandant with an aim that was near prov- 
ing fatal, for the ball passed under his arm, piercing a 
very thick door entirely through, and lodging in the jamb. 
Had we lost the worthy man by such an accident, his 
death would have spoiled the whole relish of our present 
enjoyment. He complained and received an apology for 
the soldier's behavior from his officer. Leave was im- 
mediately granted to the three French officers [left at 
Killala] to keep their swords, their effects, and even their 
bed-chambers in the house.' 

So terminated the Irish civil war of 1798; or, with 
reference to its local limitation, the Civil War of Con- 
naught. But in the year 1798, Ireland was the scene of 
two rebellions ; one in the autumn, confined to Connaught, 
— it is this which I have been circumstantially retrac- 
ing, — and another in the latter end of spring, which spent 
its rage upon the county of Wexford. These two had no 
immediate connection : that in Connaught was not the 
product of its predecessor; each, in fact, resting upon 
causes however ultimately the same, had its own separate 
occasions and immediate excitements ; and each had its 
own separate leaders and local agents. The one was a 
premature explosion of the great conspiracy conducted for 



126 LIFE AND MANNERS, 

the last five years by the Society of United Irishmen : the 
other was an unpremeditated effort in support of an abrupt 
and ill-timed foreign invasion. The general predisposing 
causes to rebellion were doubtless the same in both cases : 
but the exciting causes of the moment were different in 
each. And, finally, they were divided by a complete 
interval of two months. 

One very remarkable feature there was, however, in 
which these two separate rebellions of 1798 coincided : 
that was — the narrow range, as to time, within which 
each ran its course. Neither of them outran the limits of 
one lunar month. It is a fact, however startling, that each, 
though a perfect civil war in all its proportions, frequent 
in warlike incident, and the former rich in tragedy, passed 
through all the stages of growth, maturity, and final 
extinction, within one single revolution of the moon. For 
all the rebel movements, subsequent to the morning of 
Vinegar Hill, are to be viewed not in the light of ma- 
noeuvres made in the spirit of military hope, but as mere 
efforts of desperation, in the spirit of self-preservation, 
with the single purpose of reaching some ground having 
elbow-room sufficient, and other advantages, for general 
dispersion. 

The Connaught campaign, — because I myself, by 
residence on its central positions, and by daily excursions, 
knew all its scenery and their exact limits, and because 
the alliance of a powerful nation raised it into more dis- 
tinction as a chapter in civilized warfare, — I have dwelt 
upon at some length. The other though, philosophically 
speaking, a much more interesting war, and worthy of a 
very minute investigation, I shall crowd into a single page ; 
taking my excuse from the fact that I know the ground 
imperfectly, and only as a hasty traveller; but, in reality, 
shrinking from a subject which caused me grief even at 



THE IRISH REBELLION. 127 

that age, and which causes me humiliation even yet. For 
all parties were then deep delinquents : and the Govern- 
ment, that should have been so paternal and so willing to 
lead back its erring flock to the fold, as the first and the 
bloodiest in provocation, was the worst delinquent of all. 
Doubtless there are, as against such a government there 
ought to be, great calumnies afloat. But, when allowance 
has been made for all, there will still remain enough on 
record to establish this horrible fact, that the Government, 
in its immediate executive agents, seemed bent upon find- 
ing matter for punishment ; and to such an excess that, 
when these agents did not find it, they proceeded sys- 
tematically to create it by provocation, by irritation, by 
torture — not denied, but avowed, proclaimed, rewarded — 
and finally, for I reserve this as the consummation of the 
climax, by inflictions of personal degradation of a nature 
almost to justify rebellion. 

A few words will recapitulate this civil war, but each 
of these words may be taken as representing a chapter. 
The war of American separation it was which touched and 
quickened the dry bones that lay waiting as it were for life 
through every part of Christendom. The year 1782 
brought that war to its winding up ; and the same year it 
was which called forth Grattan and the Irish volunteers. 
That Ireland saw her own case dimly reflected in that of 
America, and that such a reference was moving in the 
national mind, appears from a remarkable fact in the his- 
tory of the year which followed. In 17S3, a haughty 
petition was addressed to the throne on behalf of the 
Roman Catholics, by an association styling itself a Con- 
gress. No man could suppose that a designation so omi- 
nously significant, had been chosen by accident ; and by 
the Court of England it was received, as it was meant, for 
an insult and a menace. What came next ? The French 



128 



LIFE AND MANNERS. 



Revolution. All flesh moved under that inspiration ; and 
the seed sown for the last ten years in Ireland, now germi- 
nated too fast and too rankly for the policy of her situa- 
tion. Concealment or delay, compromise or temporizing, 
would not have been brooked, at this moment, by the fiery 
temperament of Ireland, but through the extraordinary 
composition, as well as extraordinary constitution of that 
secret society, into which the management of her affairs 
had now devolved. In the year 1792, as we are told, 
commenced, and in 1795 was finished, the famous associa- 
tion of United Irishmen. By these terms commenced and 
finished, we are to understand not the purposes, or the 
arrangements of their conspiracy against the existing gov- 
ernment, but the net-work of organization, delicate as lace 
and strong as harness, which now enmeshed almost every 
province of Ireland, and knit the strength of her peasantry 
into unity and disposable divisions. This, it seems, was 
completed in 1795. In a complete history of these times, 
no one chapter would deserve so ample an investigation as 
this subtle web of association, rising upon a large base, 
multiplied in proportion to the extent of the county, and 
by intermediate links ascending to some unknown apex ; 
all so graduated, and in such nice dependency, as to secure 
the instantaneous propagation upwards and downwards, 
laterally or obliquely, of any impulse ; and yet so effectu- 
ally shrouded, that nobody knew more than the two or 
three individual agents in immediate juxtaposition with 
himself, by whom he communicated with those above his 
head or below his feet. This organization, in fact, of the 
United Irishmen, combined the best features, as to skill, 
of the two most elaborate and most successful of all secret 
societies recorded in history ; one of which went before 
the Irish Society, and one followed it after an interval of 
five-and-twenty years. These two are the Fehm-Gericht, 



THE IK1SH REBELLION. 129 

or court of ban and extermination, which having taken its 
rise in Westphalia, is usually called the secret Tribunal of 
Westphalia, and which reached its full development in the 
fourteenth century. The other is the Hetceria, [ r Erain,a,] 
a society which, passing for one of pure literary dilet- 
tanti, under the secret countenance of the late Capo d'lst- 
ria, (then a confidential minister of the Czar,) did actually 
succeed so far in hoaxing the Cabinets of Europe, that 
one-third of European Kings put down their names, and 
gave their aid, as conspirators against the Sultan of Tur- 
key, whilst credulously supposing themselves honorary 
correspondents of a learned body for reviving the arts and 
literature of Athens. These two I call the most successful 
of all secret societies ; because both were arrayed against 
the existing administrations throughout the entire lands 
upon which they sought to operate. The German Society 
disowned the legal authorities as too weak for the ends of 
justice, and succeeded in bringing the cognizance of 
crimes within their own secret yet consecrated usurpation. 
The Grecian Society made the existing powers the final 
object of their hostility ; lived unarmed amongst the very 
oppressors, whose throats they had dedicated to the sabre ; 
and, in a very few years, saw their purpose accomplished. 
The society of United Irishmen combined the best parts 
in the organization of both these secret fraternities, and 
obtained their advantages. The Society prospered in 
defiance of the Government ; nor would the Government, 
though armed with all the powers of the Dublin police, 
and of State thunder, have succeeded in mastering this 
Society ; but, on the contrary, the Society would assuredly 
have surprised and mastered the Government, had it not 
been undermined by the perfidy of a confidential brother. 
One instrument for dispersing knowledge, employed by 
the United Irishmen, is worth mentioning, as it is applica- 



— 



130 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

ble to any cause, and may be used with much greater 
effect in an age when everybody is taught to read. They 
printed newspapers on a single side of the sheet, which 
were thus fitted for being placarded against the walls. 
The expedient had probably been suggested by Paris, 
where such newspapers were often placarded, and gen- 
erally for the bloodiest purposes. But Louvet, in his 
Memoirs, mentions one conducted by himself on better 
principles : it was printed at the public expense ; and 
sometimes more than twenty thousand copies of a single 
number were attached to the corners of streets. This 
was called the Centinel: and those who are acquainted 
with the Memoirs of Madame Roland, will remember that 
she cites Louvet's paper as a model for all of its class. 
The Union Star was the paper which the United Irishmen 
published upon this plan ; previous papers, on the ordinary 
plan, the Northen Star, and the Press, having been vio- 
lently put down by the Government. The Union Star, 
however, it must be acknowledged, did not seek much to 
elevate the people, by improving their understandings : it 
was merely a violent appeal to their passions, against all 
who had incurred the displeasure of the secret Society. 
The newspapers of every kind it was easy for the Govern- 
ment to suppress. But the secret Society annoyed and 
crippled the Government in other modes, which it was not 
easy to parry ; and all blows dealt in return were dealt in 
the dark, and against a shadow. The Society called upon 
Irishmen to abstain generally from ardent spirits, as a 
means of destroying the Excise ; and it is certain that the 
Society was obeyed, in a degree which astonished neutral 
observers, all over Ireland. The same Society, by a 
printed proclamation, called upon the people not to pur- 
chase the quit-rents of the Crown, which were then on 
sale ; and not to receive bank-notes in payment, because, 



THE IRISH REBELLION. 131 

(as the proclamation told them,) a 'burst' was coming, 
when such paper, and the securities for such purchases, 
would fall to a ruinous discount. In this case, after much 
distress to the public service, Government obtained a par- 
tial triumph by the law which cancelled the debt on a 
refusal to receive the State paper, and which quartered 
soldiers upon all tradesmen who demurred to such a 
tender. But upon the whole, it was evident to all eyes, 
that in Ireland there were two Governments counteracting 
each other at every step ; and that the one which more 
generally had the upper hand in the struggle was the 
secret Society of the United Irishmen ; whose members 
and head-quarters were alike protected from the attacks 
of its rival, the State Government at the Castle, by a cloud 
of impenetrable darkness. 

That cloud was at last pierced. A treacherous or weak 
brother, high in the ranks of the Society, and deep in 
their counsels, happened, in travelling up to Dublin, in 
company with a loyalist, to have thrown out some hints of 
his confidential station, perhaps in ostentation. This weak 
man, Thomas Reynolds, a Roman Catholic gentleman, of 
Kilkea Castle, in Kildare, colonel of a regiment of United 
Irish, treasurer for Kildare, and in other confidential sta- 
tions for the secret Society, was prevailed on, by Mr. 
William Cope, a rich merchant of Dublin, who alarmed 
his imbecile mind, by pictures of the horrors attending a 
revolution, in the circumstances of Ireland, to betray all 
he knew to the Government. His treachery was first 
meditated in the last week of February, 1798 ; and, in 
consequence of his depositions, on March 12, at the 
house of OliverMBond, in Dublin, the Government suc- 
ceeded in arresting a large body of the leading conspira- 
tors. The whole committee of Leinster, amounting to 
thirteen members, was captured on this occasion ; but a 



132 



LIFE AND MANNERS, 



still more valuable prize was made in the persons of the 
arch-leaders and members of the Irish Directory, — Em- 
met, M'Nevin, Arthur O'Connor, and Oliver Bond. Their 
places were quickly filled up as far as names went ; and 
a hand-bill was issued, on the same day, to prevent the 
effects of despondency amongst the great body of the 
conspirators. But Emmet and O'Connor were not men 
to be effectually replaced : Government had struck a fatal 
blow, without being fully aware at first of their own good 
luck. On the 19th of May following, in consequence of a 
proclamation, (May 11,) offering a thousand pounds for 
his capture, Lord Edward Fitzgerald was apprehended at 
(flj^ti tne house of a"tMr. Nicholas Murphy, a merchant in 
> Dublin, after a very desperate resistance. The leader of 
the party, Major Swan, a magistrate, was wounded by 
Lord Edward ; and Ryan, one of the officers, so despe- 
rately, that he died within a fortnight. Lord Edward 
himself languished for some time, and died in great agony 
on the 3d of June, from a pistol shot, which took effect on 
his shoulder. Lord Edward Fitzgerald was an injured 
man. From the warm generosity of his temper, he had 
powerfully sympathized with the French republicans, at 
an early stage of their revolution ; and having, with 
great indiscretion, but an indiscretion pardonable in so 
young a man, and of so ardent a temperament, publicly 
avowed his sympathy, he was ignominiously dismissed 
from the army. That act made an enemy of a man who 
certainly was not to be despised ; for, though weak as 
respected the powers of self-control, Lord Edward was 
well qualified to make himself beloved : he had considera- 
ble talents; his name, alone, as a younger brother of the 
only ducal family in Ireland, was a spell and a word of 
command to the Irish peasantry ; and, finally, by his mar- 
riage with a natural daughter of the then Duke of Orleans, 



THE IRISH REBELLION. 133 

he had obtained some important connections and openings 
to connections in France. The young lady whom he had 
married, was generally known by the name of Pamela ; 
and it has been frequently supposed that she is the person 
described by Miss Edgeworth, under the name of Virginia, 
in the latter part of her ' Belinda.' How that may be, I 
cannot pretend to say : Pamela was certainly led into 
some follies in this country ; in particular she was said to 
have gone to a ball without shoes or stockings ; which 
seems to argue the same sort of ignorance, and the same 
docility to any chance impressions, which characterize the 
Virginia of Miss Edgew r orth. She was a daughter, I 
believe, of the wretched Philippe Egalite, by the truly 
disgusting Madame de Genlis, who had been settled in that 
Prince's family, as governess to his children, especially to 
the sister of the present French King. Lord Edward's 
whole course had been marked by generosity and noble 
feeling of every kind. Far better to have pardoned such 
a man, and conciliated his support; but 'those were not 
times of conciliation.' 

Some days after this event, were arrested the two 
brothers, name? Shearer^ men of talent, who eventually, » . . c , , t 
suffered for treason. These discoveries were made by a 
treachery of a peculiar sort ; not from a treacherous 
brother, but a pretended brother, who had succeeded in 
passing himself off for a United Irishman. Government, 
without having penetrated to the heart of the mystery, had 
now discovered enough to guide them in their most ener- 
getic precautions ; and the conspirators, whose policy had 
hitherto been to wait for the co-operation of a French 
army, now began to fear that the ground would be cut 
from beneath their feet if they waited any longer. More 
was evidently risked by delay than by dispensing with 
foreign aid. It was resolved, therefore, to commence the 



134 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

insurrection on the 23d of May ; and, in order to distract 
the Government, by simultaneous assaults upon all the 
military posts in the neighborhood of Dublin. This plan 
was discovered : but scarcely in time to prevent the effects 
of a surprise. On the 21st, late in the evening, the con- 
spiracy had been announced by the Lord Lieutenant's 
Secretary to the Lord Mayor; and, on the following day, 
by a message from his Excellency to both Houses of 
Parliament. 

The insurrection, however, began on the appointed day. 
The skirmishes were many, and in many places ; and, 
generally speaking, they were unfavorable in their results 
to the insurgents. The mail-coaches, agreeably to the 
preconcerted plan, had been all intercepted ; their non- 
arrival being everywhere understood as a negative signal 
that the war had commenced. Yet this summons to the 
more distant provinces had not been answered. The 
communication between the capital and the interior, almost 
completely interrupted at first, had been at length fully- 
restored ; and a few days saw the main strength (as it was 
supposed) of the insurrection suppressed without much 
bloodshed. 

Just at this moment, when all the world was disposed to 
think the whole affair quietly composed, the flame burst 
out with tenfold fury in a part of the country from which 
Government, with some reason, had turned away their 
anxieties and their preparations. This was the county of 
Wexford, which the Earl of Mountnorris had described to 
the Government as so entirely pacific in purpose, and so 
well-affected to the loyal cause, that he had pledged him- 
self for its good conduct. On the night before Whitsun- 
day, however, May 27, the standard of revolt was raised 
by John Murphy, a Catholic priest, well known in the 



THE IRISH REBELLION. 135 

further progress of this insurrection, under the title of 
Father Murphy. 

The campaign opened inauspiciously for the royalists. 
The rebels had posted themselves on two eminences, — 
Kilthomas, about ten miles to the westward of Gorey, and 
the hill of Oulart, half way (t. e. about a dozen miles) be- 
tween Gorey and Wexford. They were attacked at each 
point on Whitsunday. From the first they were driven 
easily, and with considerable loss ; but at Oulart the suc- 
cess was very different. Father Murphy commanded here 
in person ; and finding that his men gave way in great 
confusion before a picked body of the North Cork militia, 
under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Foote, he con- 
trived to persuade them that their flight was leading them 
right upon a body of Royal cavalry posted to intercept the 
retreat. This fear effectually halted them. The insur- 
gents, from inexperience, had always an unreasonable 
dread of cavalry. A second time, therefore, facing about 
to retreat from this imaginary enemy, they came, of 
necessity, full upon their pursuers, whom the intoxication 
of victory had by this time brought into the most careless 
disarray. These, almost to a man, the rebels annihilated : 
and immediately availing themselves of the universal con- 
sternation, Father Murphy led them to Ferns, and thence 
to the attack of Enniscorthy. The insurgents were now 
seven or eight thousand strong. 

Has the reader witnessed, or has he heard described, 
the sudden burst, — the explosion, one might almost say, 
— by which a Swedish winter passes into spring, and 
spring into summer ? The sceptre of winter does not then 
moulder away by just gradations : it is broken, it is shat- 
tered, in a day, in an hour ; and with a violence brought 
home to every sense. No second type of resurrection, so 
mighty or so affecting, is manifested by nature in southern 



— 



136 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

climates. Such is the headlong tumult, such the ; torrent 
rapture,' by which life is let loose amongst the air, the 
earth, and the waters under the earth, that one might 
imagine the trumpet of the archangel to have sounded 
already for the second time, (Par. Lost, book xi, v. 75,) 
and the final victory to have swallowed up for ever the 
empire of Death. Not by way of saying something rhe- 
torical, but as an expression barely and poorly correspond- 
ing to my strong impressions of this memorable case, I 
would say, that, what a vernal resurrection in high lati- 
tudes is in manifestations of power and life, by compari- 
son with climates that have no winter, such, and marked 
with features as distinct, w r as this Irish insurrection, when 
suddenly surrendered to the whole contagion of the pas- 
sions then let loose, and to the frenzy of excitement, which 
mastered the popular mind at that era, by comparison 
with common military movements, and the pedantry of 
mere technical warfare. What a picture must Enniscor- 
thy have presented on the 27th of May ! Fugitives crowd- 
ing in from Ferns, announced the rapid advance of 
the rebels, now, at least, 7000 strong, elated with vic- 
tory, and maddened with vindictive fury. Soon after 
noon their advanced guard, considerably above 1000, 
and well armed w T ith muskets, (pillaged, by the by, from 
royal magazines, hastily deserted,) commenced a tumultu- 
ous assault. Less than 300 militia and yeomanry formed 
the garrison of the place, which had no sort of defences, 
except the natural one of the river Slaney. This, how- 
ever, was fordable, and that the assailants knew. The 
slaughter amongst the rebels, from the little caution they 
exhibited, and their total defect of military skill, was mur- 
derous. Spite of their immense numerical advantages, 
it is probable they would have been defeated. But in 



THE IRISH REBELLION. 137 

Enniscorthy, (as where not?) treason from within was 
emboldened to show itself at the very crisis of suspense. 
Incendiaries were at work ; flames began to issue from 
many houses at once. Retreat, itself, became suddenly 
doubtful ; depending, as it did, altogether upon the state 
of the wind. At the right hand of every royalist stood a 
traitor ; in his own house were other traitors ; in the front, 
was the enemy ; in the rear, was a line of blazing streets. 
Three hours the battle had raged ; it was now four, p. m. ; 
and, at this moment, the garrison hastily gave way, and 
fled to Wexford. 

Now came a scene hardly matched for its variety of 
horrors, except in September, 1812, upon the line of the 
French advance to Moscow, through the blazing villages 
of Russia. All the loyalists of Enniscorthy, ail the gentry 
for miles around, who had congregated in that town, as a 
centre of security, were summoned at that moment, not to 
an orderly retreat, but to instant flight. At one end of the 
street were seen the rebel pikes and bayonets, and fierce 
faces, already gleaming through the smoke : at the other 
end, volumes of fire surging and billowing from the thatch- 
ed roofs, common in that country, and blazing rafters, 
beginning to block up the avenues of escape. Then began 
the agony, in the proper sense of that word, — that is, 
the strife and uttermost conflict, of what is worst and what 
is best in human nature. Then was to be seen the very 
delirium of fear, and the delirium of vindictive malice ; 
private and ignoble hatred, of ancient origin, shrouding 
itself in the mask of patriotic wrath ; the tiger glare of just 
vengeance, fresh from intolerable wrongs and the never- 
to-be-forgotten ignominy of stripes and personal degrada- 
tion ; panic, self-palsied by its own excess ; flight, eager 
or stealthy, according to the temper or the means ; volley- 
ing pursuit; the very frenzy of agitation, under every 
10 



138 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

mode of excitement ; and here and there, unappalled and 
self-sustained, the desperation of maternal love, victorious 
and supreme above all lower passions. I recapitulate and 
gather under general abstractions, many individual anec- 
dotes, reported by those who were on that day present 
in Enniscorthy ; for at Ferns, not far off, and deeply 
interested in all those transactions, I had private friends, 
intimate participators in the trials of that fierce hurricane, 
and joint sufferers with those who suffered most in prop- 
erty and in feeling. Ladies were then seen in crowds, 
hurrying on foot to Wexford, the nearest asylum, though 
fourteen miles distant, — many in slippers, bare-headed, 
and without any supporting arm ; for the flight of their 
defenders, having been determined by a sudden angular 
movement of the assailants, coinciding with the failure of 
their own ammunition after firing, had left no time to give 
warning ; and most fortunate it was for the unhappy fugi- 
tives, that the confusion of the burning streets, together 
w r ith the seductions of pillage, drew aside so many of the 
victors as to break the unity and perseverance of the 
pursuit. 

Wexford, however, was in no condition to promise more 
than a momentary shelter. Orders had been already 
issued to extinguish all domestic fires throughout the town, 
and to unroof all the thatched houses ; so great was the 
jealousy of internal treason. From without, the alarm 
was hourly increasing. On Tuesday, the 29th of May, 
the rebel army advanced from Enniscorthy to a post 
called Three Rocks, not much above two miles from 
Wexford. Their strength was now increased to at least 
15,000 men. Never was there a case requiring more 
energy in the disposers of the military force ; never was 
there one which met with less, in the most responsible 
quarters. The nearest military station was the fort at 



THE IRISH REBELLION. 139 

Duncannon, twenty-three miles distant. Thither, on the 
29th, an express had been despatched by the Mayor of 
Wexford, reporting their situation, and calling for imme- 
diate aid. General Fawcet replied, that he would himself 
march that same evening with the 13th regiment, part of 
the Meath militia, and sufficient artillery. Relying upon 
these assurances, the small parties of militia and yeoman- 
ry then in Wexford gallantly threw themselves upon the 
most trying services in advance. Some companies of the 
Donegal militia, not mustering above 200 men, marched 
immediately to a position between the rebel camp and 
Wexford ; whilst others of the North Cork militia and 
the local yeomanry, with equal cheerfulness, undertook 
the defence of that town. Meantime, General Fawcet 
had consulted his personal comfort, by halting for the 
night, though aware of the dreadful emergency, at a 
station sixteen miles short of Wexford. A small detach- 
ment, however, with part of his artillery, he sent forward ; 
and these were the next morning intercepted by the 
rebels, at Three Rocks, [such was the activity and such 
the information of general officers in those days !] and 
massacred almost to a man. Two officers, who escaped 
the slaughter, carried the intelligence to the advanced 
post of the Donegals ; but they, so far from being dis- 
heartened, marched immediately against the rebel army, 
enormous as was the disproportion, with the purpose of 
recapturing the artillery. A singular contrast this to the 
conduct of General Fawcet, who retreated hastily to Dun- 
cannon upon the first intelligence of this disaster. Such 
a movement was so little anticipated by the gallant Done- 
gals, that they continued to advance against the enemy, 
until the precision with which the captured artillery was 
served against themselves, and the non-appearance of the 
promised aid, warned them to retire. At Wexford they 



140 



LIFE AND MANNERS. 



found all in confusion and the hurry of retreat. The 
flight, as it may be called, of General Fawcet was now- 
confirmed ; and, as the local position of Wexford made it 
indefensible against artillery, the whole body of loyalists, 
except those whom insufficient warning threw into the 
rear, now fled from the wrath of the rebels to Duncannon. 
It is a shocking illustration of the thoughtless ferocity 
which characterized too many of the Orange troops, that, 
along the whole line of this retreat, they continued to burn 
the cabins of Roman Catholics, and often to massacre, in 
cold blood, the unoffending inhabitants, totally forgetful of 
the many hostages whom the insurgents now held in their 
power, and careless of the dreadful provocations which 
they were thus throwing out to the bloodiest reprisals. 

Thus it was, and by such insufferable mismanagement, 
or base torpor, that on the 30th of May, not having raised 
their standard before the 26th, the rebels had already 
possessed themselves of the county of Wexford, in its 
whole southern division, — Ross and Duncannon only 
excepted ; of which the latter was not liable to capture 
by coup -de -main, and the other was saved by the procras- 
tination of the rebels. The northern division of the 
county was overrun pretty much in the same hasty style, 
and through the same unpardonable blunders in point of 
caution, and previous concert of plans. Upon first turning 
their views to the north, the rebels had taken up a position 
on the hill of Corrigrua, as a station from which they 
could march with advantage upon the town of Gorey, 
lying seven miles to the northward. On the 1st of June, 
a very brilliant affair had taken place between a mere 
handful of militia and yeomanry, from this town of Gorey, 
and a very strong detachment from the rebel camp. 
Many persons at the time regarded this as the best fought 
action in the whole war. The two parties had met about 



THE IRISH REBELLION. 141 

two miles from Gorey ; and it is pretty certain that, if the 
yeoman cavalry, (who were seldom of any real use,) 
could have been prevailed on to charge at the proper 
time, the defeat would have been a most murderous one 
to the rebels. As it was, they escaped with considerable 
loss of honor. But even this they retrieved within a few 
days, in a remarkable way, and with circumstances of 
still greater scandal to the military discretion in high 
quarters, than had attended the movements of General 
Fawcet in the south. 

On the 4th of June, a little army of 1500 men, under 
the command of Major-General Loftus, had assembled at 
Gorey. The plan was — to march by two different roads 
upon the rebel encampment at Corrigrua ; and this plan 
was adopted. Meantime, on that same night, the rebel 
army had put themselves in motion for Gorey ; and of 
this counter-movement, full and timely information was 
given by a farmer at the royal head-quarters ; but such 
was the obstinate infatuation, that no officer of rank would 
condescend to give him a hearing. The consequences 
may be imagined. Colonel Walpole, an Englishman, full 
of courage, but presumptuously disdainful of the enemy, 
led a division upon one of the two roads, having no scouts, 
nor taking any sort of precaution. He was suddenly sur- 
prised, and faced : he refused to halt or to retire ; was 
shot through the head ; and a great part of the advanced 
detachment was slaughtered on the spot, and his artillery 
captured. General Loftus, advancing on the parallel 
road, heard the firing, and detached the grenadier com- 
pany of the Antrim militia, to the aid of Walpole. These, 
to the amount of seventy men, were cut off almost to a 
man ; and when the General, who could not cross over to 
the other road, through the enclosures, from the encum- 
brance of his artillery, had at length reached the scene of 



142 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

action by a long circuit, he found himself in the following 
truly ludicrous position : — The rebels had pursued Colonel 
Walpole's division to Gorey, and possessed themselves of 
that place ; the General had thus lost his head-quarters, 
without having seen the army whom he had suffered to 
slip past him in the dark. He marched back disconso- 
lately to Gorey, took a look at the rebel posts which now 
occupied the town in strength, was saluted with a few 
rounds from his own cannon, and finally retreated out of 
the county. 

I have related this movement of General Loftus, and 
the previous one of General Fawcet, more circumstan- 
tially than might have been proper, because they both 
forcibly illustrate the puerile imbecility with which the 
Royal cause was then conducted. Both foundered in one 
hour, through surprises against which each was amply 
forewarned. Fortunately for the Government, the affairs 
of the rebels were managed even worse. Two sole en- 
terprises were undertaken by them after this, previously 
to their final and ruinous defeat at Vinegar Hill ; both of 
the very utmost importance to their interests, and both sure 
of success if they had been pushed forward in time. The 
first was the attack upon Ross, undertaken on the 29th of 
May, the day after the capture of Enniscorthy ; it must 
inevitably have succeeded, and would immediately have 
laid open to the rebels the important counties of Water- 
ford and Kilkenny. Being delayed until the 5th of June, 
the assault was repulsed with prodigious slaughter. The 
other was the attack upon Arklow, in the north. On the 
capture of Gorey, on the night of June 4, as the imme- 
diate consequence of Colonel Walpole's defeat, had the 
rebels advanced upon Arklow, they would have found it 
for some days totally undefended ; the whole garrison 
having retreated in panic, early in the morning of June 5, 



THE IRISH REBELLION. 143 

to Wicklow. The capture of this important place would 
have laid open the whole road to the capital, would prob- 
ably have caused a rising in that great city, and, in any 
event, would have indefinitely prolonged the war, and 
multiplied the distractions of Government. Merely from 
sloth, and the spirit of procrastination, however, the rebel 
army halted at Gorey until the 9th, and then advanced 
with what seemed the overpowering force of 27,000 men. 
It is a striking lesson upon the subject of procrastination, 
that, precisely on that morning of June 9, the attempt had 
first become hopeless. Until then the place had been 
positively emptied of all inhabitants whatsoever. Exactly 
on the 9th, the old garrison had been ordered back from 
Wicklow, and reinforced by a crack English regiment, 
(the Durham Fencibles,) on whom chiefly the defence on 
this day devolved ; which was peculiarly arduous, from 
the vast numbers of the assailants, but brilliant and per- 
fectly successful. 

This obstinate and fiercely contested battle of Arklow 
was, by general consent, the hinge on which the rebellion 
turned. Nearly 30,000 men, all armed with pikes, and 
5000 with muskets, and supported by some artillery, suf- 
ficiently well served to do considerable execution at a 
most important point in the line of defence, could not be 
defeated without a very trying struggle. And here again 
it is worthy of record, that General Needham, who com- 
manded on this day, would have followed the example of 
Generals Fawcet and Loftus, and have ordered a retreat, 
had he not been opposed by Colonel Sherret of the Dur- 
ham regiment. Such was the almost uniform imbecility, 
and the want of moral courage, on the part of the military 
leaders : for it would be unjust to impute any defect in 
animal courage to the feeblest of these leaders. General 
Needham, for example, exposed his person without reserve 



144 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

throughout the whole of this difficult day. But he could 
not face a trying responsibility. 

From the defeat of Arklow, the rebels gradually retired, 
between the 9th and the 20th of June, to their main mili- 
tary position of Vinegar Hill, which lies immediately 
above the town of Enniscorthy, and had fallen into their 
hands on the 28th of May, when that place was captured. 
Here their whole forces, with the exception of per- 
haps 6000, who attacked General Moore, when march- 
ing on the 26th towards Wexford, were concentrated ; 
and hither the Royal army, 13,000 strong, with a 
respectable artillery, under the supreme command of 
General Lake, converged in four separate divisions, about 
the 19th and 20th of June. The great blow was to be 
struck on the 21st ; and the plan was, that the Royal 
forces, moving to the assault of the rebel position upon 
four opposite radii, should completely surround their en- 
campment and shut up every avenue to escape. On this 
plan, the field of battle would have been one vast slaugh- 
ter-house ; for quarter was not granted. But the ma- 
noeuvre, if it were ever seriously entertained, was entirely 
defeated by the failure of General Needham, who did not 
present himself with his division until nine o'clock, a full 
half-hour after the battle was over, and thus gained for 
himself the sobriquet of the late General Needham. 
Whether the failure were really in this officer, or (as was 
alleged by his apologists) in the inconsistent orders issued 
to him by General Lake, with the covert intention, as 
many believe, of mercifully counteracting his own scheme 
of wholesale butchery, to this day remains obscure. The 
effect of this delay, caused how it might, was for once 
such as must win everybody's applause. The action had 
commenced at seven o'clock in the morning. By half- 
past eight, the whole rebel army was in flight, and nat- 






THE IRISH REBELLION. 145 

urally making for the only point left unguarded, it escaped 
with no great slaughter, (but leaving behind all its artil- 
lery and a good deal of valuable plunder,) through what 
was facetiously called ever afterwards Needlimn's gap. 
After this capital rout of Vinegar Hill, the rebel army 
daily mouldered away. A large body, however, of the 
fiercest and most desperate continued for some time to 
make flying marches in all directions, according to the 
positions of the King's forces, and the momentary favor 
of accidents. Once or twice they were brought to action 
by Sir James Duff and Sir Charles Asgill ; and, ludi- 
crously enough, once more they were suffered to escape 
by the eternal delays of the late General Needham. At 
length, however, after many skirmishes, and all varieties of 
local success, they finally dispersed upon a bog in the 
county of Dublin. Many desperadoes, however, took up 
their quarters for a long time in the dwarf woods of Kil- 
laughrim, near Enniscorthy, assuming the trade of marau- 
ders, but ludicrously designating themselves the Babes in 
the Wood. It is an explicable fact, that many deserters 
from the militia regiments, who had behaved well through- 
out the campaign, and adhered faithfully to their colors, 
now resorted to this confederation of the woods ; from 
which it cost some trouble to dislodge them. Another 
party in the woods and mountains of Wicklow, were 
found still more formidable, and continued to infest the 
adjacent country through the ensuing winter. These were 
not finally ejected from their lairs, until after one of their 
chiefs had been killed in a night skirmish by a young man 
defending his house, and the other, weary of his savage 
life, had surrendered himself to transportation. 

It diffused general satisfaction throughout Ireland, that, 
on the very day before the final engagement of Vinegar 
Hill. Lord Cornwall is made his cntrv into Dublin as the 



LIFE AXD XAXXERS. 

new Lord-Lieutenant ; and soon after Lord Camden de- 
parted. A proclamation, issued early in July, of general 
amnesty, to all who had shed no blood except on the field 
of battle, notified to the country the new spirit of policy 
which animated the Government, and doubtless worked 

marvels in healing the agitations of the land. Still it was 

_ 

thought necessary that severe justice should take hs course 
amongst the most conspicuous leaders or agents in the in- 
surrection. Martial law still prevailed; and, under that 
law. severe justice is often no justice at all. Many of 
those who had shown the greatest generosity, and with no 
slight risk to themselves, were now selected to suffer. 
Bagenal Harvey, a Protestant gentleman, who had held 
the supreme command of the rebel army for some time 
with infinite vexation to himself, and taxed with no one 
instance of cruelty or excess, was one of those doomed to 
execution. He had possessed an estate of nearly three 
thousand per annum : and at the same time with him was 
executed another gentleman, of more than three times that 
e, Cornelius Grogan. Singular it was, that men of 
this condition and property, men of feeling and refine- 
ment, who could not expect to be gainers by such revolu- 
tionary movements, should have staked their peace and 
the happiness of their families upon a contest so forlorn 
from the very first. Some there were, however, and pos- 
sibly these gentlemen, who could have explained their 
motives intelligibly enough : they had been forced by per- 
secution, and actually baited into the ranks of the rebels. 
One characteristic difference in the deaths of these two 
gentlemen was remarkable, as contrasted with their pre- 
vious habits. Grogan was constitutionally timid, and yet 
he faced the scaffold and the trying preparations of the 
executioner with fortitude. On the other hand, Bagenal 
Harvev, who had fought several duels with coolness, ex- 



THE IRISH REBELLION. 147 

hibited considerable trepidation in his last moments. Per- 
haps in both, the difference might be due entirely to some 
physical accident of health, or momentary nervous de- 
rangement. 

Among the crowd, however, of persons superior in rank 
who suffered death at this disastrous era, there were two 
whom chiefly I regretted, and would have gone any dis- 
tance to have shaken hands with. One was a butcher, the 
other a seafaring man, both rebels. But they must have 
been truly generous, brave, and noble-minded men. For, 
during the occupation of Wexford by the rebel army, they 
were repeatedly the sole opponents, at great personal risk, 
to the general massacre then meditated by the Popish 
fanatics. And, finally, when all resistance seemed likely 
to be unavailing, they both insisted resolutely with the 
chief patron of this bloody proposal, that he should fight 
them with sword or pistol as he might prefer, and c prove 
himself a man,' (as they expressed it,) before he should 
be at liberty to sport in this wholesale way with innocent 
blood. 

One dreadful fact I shall state in taking leave of this 
subject ; and that, I believe, will be quite sufficient to sus- 
tain anything I have said in disparagement of the Govern- 
ment; by which, however, I mean, in justice, the local 
administration of Ireland. For, as to the supreme Gov- 
ernment in England, that body must be supposed, at the 
utmost, to have sanctioned the recommendations of the 
Irish cabinet, even when it interfered so far. In particu- 
lar, the scourgings and flagellations resorted to in Wexford 
and Kildare, &c, must have been originally suggested by 
minds familiar with the habits of the Irish aristocracy in 
the treatment of dependants. Candid Irishmen must admit 
that the habit of kicking, or threatening to kick, waiters 
in coffee-houses or other dependants, — a habit which, in 



148 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

England, would be met instantly by defiance and menaces 
of action for assault and battery, — is not yet altogether 
obsolete in Ireland. Thirty years ago it was still more 
prevalent, and marked that spirit and temper in the treat- 
ment of menial dependants, with which doubtless origi- 
nated the measure of judicial flagellations. To return, 
however ; — that fact with which I proposed to close my 
recollections of this great tumult, and which I hold to be a 
sufficient guarantee for the very severest reflections on the 
spirit of the Government, is expressed significantly in the 
terms, memorable enough, but commonly used by Roman 
Catholic gentlemen, in prudential exculpation of them- 
selves, when threatened with inquiry for their conduct 
during these times of agitation : — 'I thank my God that 
no man can charge me justly with having saved the life of 
any Protestant, or his house from pillage, by my interces- 
sion with the rebel chiefs.' What did this mean ? Some 
Roman Catholics had pleaded, and pleaded truly, as a 
reason for special indulgence to themselves, that they had 
used anv influence, which might belong to them on the 
score of religion, or of private friendship with the rebel 
authorities, on behalf of persecuted Protestants ; either in 
delivering them altogether, or in softening their doom. 
But, to the surprise of everybody, this plea was so far 
from being entertained or allowed any weight by the 
courts of inquiry, that, on the contrary, an argument was 
uniformly built upon it, dangerous in the last degree to the 
pleader. i You admit, then,' it was retorted, c having had 
this very considerable influence upon the rebel councils; 
in that case we must suppose you to have been known 
privately as their friend and supporter.' Readily it may 
be supposed, that few would be likely to urge such a vindi- 
cation, when it became known in what way it was fated to 
operate. The Government itself had made it perilous to 



THE IRISH REBELLION. 149 

profess humanity ; and every man henceforward gloried 
publicly in his callousness and insensibility, as the best 
safeguard to himself in a path so closely beset with rocks. 

In the latter end o£ October, I quitted Connaught with 
Lord W., and we returned slowly to Dublin. Thence, 
after some little stay, we crossed the Irish Channel ; and 
by the same route through North Wales, we travelled 
together to Birmingham. 



CHAPTER V. 

PREMATURE MANHOOD. 

It was at Birmingham, the great centre of travelling in 
England, where so many of the great roads converge, 
and which I, like myriads besides, have visited, therefore, 
many hundreds of times, without ever yet having gone 
thither as a terminus ad quern: — at Birmingham it was, 
that I parted w T ith my friend Lord W. His route lay 
through Oxford ; and stopping, therefore, no longer than 
was necessary to harness fresh horses, an operation, how- 
ever, which was seldom accomplished in less than half an 
hour at that era, he went on directly to Stratford. My 
own destination was yet doubtful. I had been directed, in 
Dublin, to inquire at the Birmingham Post-Office, for a let- 
ter which would guide my motions. There, accordingly, 
upon sending for it, lay the expected letter from my 
mother, from which I learned that my sister was visiting 
at L — xt — n, in Northamptonshire, a seat of Lord C — r- 
b — ry's, to which place I also had an invitation ; and that 
during my stay at that place some final resolution would 
be taken, and announced to me, as to the disposal of my 
time, for the two or three years before I could be supposed 
old enough, on the English system, for going to Oxford or 
Cambridge. This was the part of the letter which I read 
with the deepest interest. It is true, that I was yet the 
merest boy ; having, in fact, completed my fifteenth birth- 



PREMATURE MANHOOD. 151 

day, about three months before, in Ireland ; but by learn- 
ing, by knowledge of the world, and by pride of heart, I 
had outgrown a school ; and, from these causes as well as 
my premature gravity, and (I may say it without vanity) 
premature dignity of mind, I could not easily humble 
myself to the idea of taking my station amongst ignorant 
boys, and under a master who had little chance of having 
half my own learning. I was glad, therefore, to find the 
evil day deferred at least ; and I had private reasons for 
rejoicing that the final decision was to be made at L — x- 
t — n. Meantime, my route lay through Stamford, to which 
I found that I could go by a stage-coach on the following 
day ; and of necessity I prepared to make the most of that 
day in gloomy, noisy, and, at that time, dirty Birming- 
ham. 

Be not offended, compatriot of Birmingham, that I salute 
your natal town with these disparaging epithets. It is not 
my habit to indulge rash impulses of contempt towards 
any man or body of men, wheresoever collected, far less 
towards a race of high-minded and most intelligent 
citizens, such as Birmingham has exhibited to the admi- 
ration of all Europe. But as to the noise and the gloom 
which I ascribe, those features of your town will illustrate 
what the Germans mean by a one-sided (ein-seitiger) judg- 
ment. There are, I can well believe, thousands to whom 
Birmingham is another name for domestic peace, and for 
a reasonable share of sunshine. But in my case, who 
have passed through Birmingham many hundred times, it 
always happened to rain, except once ; and that once the 
Shrewsbury mail carried me so rapidly away that I had 
not time to examine the sunshine, or see whether it might 
not be some gilt Birmingham counterfeit ; for you know, 
men of Birmingham, that you can counterfeit — such is 
your cleverness — all things in heaven and earth, from 



152 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

Jove's thunderbolts down to a tailor's bodkin. Therefore, 
the gloom is to be charged to my bad luck. Then, as to 
the noise, never did I sleep at that enormous Hen and 
Chickens, to which usually my destiny brought me ; but I 
had reason to marvel that the discreet hen did not gather 
her vagrant flock to roost at less variable hours. Till two 
or three I was kept waking by those who were retiring ; 
and about three commenced the morning functions of the 
porter, or of ' boots,' or of ' under-boots,' who began 
their rounds to collect their several freights for the High- 
flyer, or the Tally-ho, or the Bang-up, to all points of the 
compass, and too often (as must happen in such immense 
establishments) blundered into my room, with that appall- 
ing, ; Now, Sir, the horses are coming out.' So that 
rarely indeed have I happened to sleep in Birmingham. 
But the dirt ! — that sticks a little with you, friend of 
Birmingham. How do I explain away that ? Know, then, 
reader, that at the time I speak of, and in the way I speak 
of, all England was dirty. 

The next day I crossed the country to Stamford, and 
thence, by a stage of nine miles, to L — xt — n. Here I 
passed an interval, the happiest of my childish life. I was 
again in the house of an Irish nobleman ; and my position, 
therefore, as regarded amusement and freedom of choice 
in disposing of my time, may be supposed to have been 
pretty much the same with that which I had just quitted in 
Ireland. In reality, however, it was very different. Lord 
C — rb — ry was what is commonly and somewhat con- 
temptuously called a fox-hunter. But fox-hunters, as a 
class, are not the contemptible persons one might suppose 
from satiric sketches ; at least in my own experience. [ 
have found them far otherwise. It is always beneficial to 
a man's temper, and does not interfere with any intellectual 



PREMATURE MANHOOD. 153 

qualities he may have, to be placed in the way of hard 
and continual exercise. Nothing so effectually rids a man 
of bodily irritation, such as arises from sedentary habits ; 
and thus far, nothing is so well fitted to sustain a tone of 
genial spirits and good temper. As to any bad effects, it 
is difficult to see in what way the practice of hunting or 
hard riding should ally itself with one set of habits rather 
than another, except through the social connections which 
it promotes. Now, as to the probable quality of these 
connections, the reader must be shy of taking his present 
impressions from the ill-natured and false delineations of 
books. These are generally antiquated, and (where true 
at all) suited to a past age. The country gentlemen, 
indeed generally, of this island, are a class most malig- 
nantly traduced in books ; persons answering to the Squire 
Westerns, of Fielding, supposing them ever to have ex- 
isted, are now to be found only in novels. As to Lord 
C — rb — ry, connected by birth and political influence with 
the Irish county of Limerick, where he had a family seat, 
called Carass, he resorted to England, chiefly, I believe, 
on account of the hunting in Leicestershire and the adja- 
cent counties, and, in part, perhaps, with a view to London. 
But he was far from being an illiterate man, or without 
interest in literature. He was that Etonian whom I had 
alluded to in my interview with George III., as having 
urged my mother to place me at Eton. Having himself 
had a full Etonian training, and looking back with pleasure 
upon the manliness of the sports, and the republican 
equality established by the system of manners in that 
great seminary, he never allowed himself to suppose that 
any rational creature could hesitate in giving a preference 
to Eton, where the expense could be borne. That sole 
ground of demur he admitted as consistent with a man's 
sanity, but no other. And certainly some weight will be 
11 



154 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

allowed to that, when I mention the following anecdote : 
Dining with a gentleman about 1823, who had two sons at 
Eton, and three of a more advanced age, at Cambridge, 
1 heard with astonishment that the two Etonians cost him 
annually as much (or nearly so) as the three cantabs : the 
boys cost c£300 per annum each, the young men about 
.£220. 

When, by what test, by what indication, does manhood 
commence ? Physically by one criterion, legally by 
another, morally by a third, mentally by a fourth, — and 
all indefinite. Equator, absolute equator, there is none. 
Between the two spheres of youth and age, perfect and 
imperfect manhood, as in all analogous cases, there is no 
strict line of bisection. The change is a large process 
accomplished within a large and corresponding space ; 
having, perhaps, some central or equatorial line, but lying, 
like that of our earth, between certain tropics, or limits 
widely separated. This tropical region may, and gene- 
rally does, cover a number of years ; and, therefore, it is 
hard to say, even for an assigned case, by any tolerable 
approximation, at what precise era it would be reasonable 
to describe the individual as having ceased to be a boy, 
and as having attained his inauguration as a man. Physi- 
cally, we know that there is a very large latitude of differ- 
ences, in the periods of human maturity, not merely 
between individual and individual, but also between nation 
and nation ; differences so great, that, in some southern 
regions of Asia, we hear of matrons at the aoe of twelve. 
And though, as Mr. Sadler rightly insisrs, a romance of 
exaggeration has been built upon the facts, enough remains 
behind of real marvel, to irritate the curiosity of the physi- 
ologist, as to its efficient, and, perhaps, of the philosopher, 
as to its final cause. Legally and politically, that is con- 



PREMATURE MANHOOD. 155 

ventionally, the differences are even greater on a com- 
parison of nations and eras. In England we have seen 
senators of mark and authority, nay, even a Prime Minis- 
ter, the haughtiest, the most despotic, and the most irre- 
sponsible of his times, at an age, which, in many states, 
both ancient and modern, would have operated as a ground 
of absolute challenge to the candidate for offices the 
meanest. Intellectually speaking, again, a very large 
proportion of men never attain maturity. Nonage is their 
final destiny ; and manhood, in this respect, is for them a 
pure idea. Finally, as regards the moral development, by 
which I mean the whole system and economy of their love 
and hatred, of their admirations and contempts, the total 
organization of their pleasures and their pains, hardly any 
of our species ever attain manhood. It would be unphi- 
losophic to say, that intellects of the highest order were, 
or could be developed fully, without a corresponding 
development of the whole nature. But of such intellects 
there do not appear above two or three in a thousand 
years. It is a fact, forced upon one by the whole experi- 
ence of life, that almost all men are children, more or 
less, in their tastes and admirations. This needs little 
proof. Society is absolutely held together, under its 
present constitution, by the baby feelings to which I 
allude. Were there no admiration for wealth carried to 
accumulation far beyond what is practically disposable, 
of honors which are no honors, and of tinsel decorations, 
the foundations of society, as it is, would actually give 
way. Oh, man ! were it not for thy latent tendencies, — 
were it not for that imperishable grandeur, which exists by 
way of germ and ultimate possibility in thy nature, hidden 
as it is, and often all but effaced, — how unlimited would 
be my contempt for thy species ; and that misanthropy, 
which now I fight against when I find it stealing gradually 



156 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

over my reluctant mind, would, but for the angelic ideal 
buried and embruted in thy sordid and grovelling race, 
become fixed, absolute, and deliberately cherished. 

But, to resume my question, how, under so variable a 
standard, both natural and conventional, of everything 
almost that can be received for a test or a presumption of 
manhood, shall we seize upon any characteristic feature, 
sufficiently universal to serve a practical use, as a criterion 
of the transition from the childish mind to the dignity 
(relative dignity at least) of that mind which belongs to 
conscious maturity ? One such criterion, and one only, 
as I believe, there is — all others are variable and uncer- 
tain. It lies in the reverential feeling, sometimes suddenly 
developed, towards woman, and the idea of woman. From 
that moment when women cease to be regarded with care- 
lessness, and when the ideal of womanhood, in its total 
pomp of loveliness and purity, dawns like some vast 
aurora upon the mind, boyhood has ended ; childish 
thoughts and inclinations have passed away for ever ; and 
the gravity of manhood, with the self-respecting views of 
manhood, have commenced. These feelings, no doubt, 
depend for their development in part upon physical 
causes ; but they are also determined by the many retard- 
ing or accelerating forces enveloped in circumstances of 
position, and sometimes in pure accident. For myself, I 
remember most distinctly the very day — the scene, and 
its accidents, when that mysterious awe fell upon me 
which belongs to woman in her ideal portrait : and from 
that hour a profounder gravity colored all my thoughts, 
and a l beauty, still more beauteous,' was lit up for me in 
this agitating world. My Irish friend and myself had been 
on a visit to a noble family about fifty miles from Dublin ; 
and we were returning from Tullamore by a public pas- 
sage-boat, on the splendid canal which connects that place 



PREMATURE MANHOOD. 157 

with the metropolis. To avoid attracting an unpleasant 
attention to ourselves in public situations, I observed a rule 

of never addressing Lord W by his title : but it so 

happened that the canal carried us along the margin of an 
estate belonging to the Earl (now Marquis) of W — t- 
m — th ; and on turning an angle, we came suddenly in 
view of this nobleman's bulky person, taking his morning 
lounge in the sun. Somewhat loftily he reconnoitered the 
miscellaneous party of clean and unclean beasts, crowded 
on the deck of our ark, ourselves amongst the number, 
whom he challenged gaily as young acquaintances from 
Dublin ; and my friend he saluted more than once as c My 
Lord.' This accident made known to the assembled mob 
of our fellow-travellers Lord W.'s rank, and led to a scene 
rather too broadly exposing the spirit of this world. Herd- 
ing together on the deck, (or roof of that den denominated 
the ' s t at e-cab'mj) stood a party of young ladies, headed 
by their governess. In the cabin below was mamma, who 
as yet had not condescended to illuminate our circle, for 
she was an awful personage — a wit, a blue-stocking, and 
a leader of ton in Dublin and Belfast. The fact, however, 
that a young Lord, and one of great expectations, was on 
board, brought her up. A short cross-examination of Lord 
W.'s French valet, had confirmed the flying report, and 
at the same time, (I suppose,) put her in possession of my 
defect in all those advantages of title, fortune, and expec- 
tation, which so brilliantly distinguished my friend. Her 
admiration of him, and her contempt for myself, were 
equally undisguised. And in the ring which she soon 
cleared out for public exhibition, she made us both fully 
sensible of the very equitable stations which she assigned 
to us in her regard. She was neither very brilliant, nor 
altogether a pretender, but might be described as a showy 
woman, of slight, but popular accomplishments. Any 



158 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

woman, however, has the advantage of possessing the ear 
of any company : and a woman of forty, with such tact 
and experience, as she will naturally have gathered in a 
talking practice of such duration, can find little difficulty 
in mortifying a boy, or sometimes, perhaps, in tempting 
him to unfortunate sallies of irritation. Me it was clear 
that she viewed in the light of a humble friend, or what is 
known in fashionable life by the humiliating name of 
a ' toad-eater.' Lord W., full of generosity in what 
regarded his own pretensions, and who never had violated 
the perfect equality which reigned in our deportment to 
each other, colored with as much confusion as myself at 
her coarse insinuations. And, in reality, our ages scarcely 
allowed of that relation which she supposed to exist 
between us. Possibly, she did not suppose it : but it is 
essential to the wit, and the display of some people, that it 
should have a foundation in malice. A victim, and a sac- 
rifice, are indispensable conditions in every exhibition. In 
such a case my natural sense of justice would generally 
have armed me a hundred-fold for retaliation ; but at 
present, chiefly perhaps because I had no effectual ally, 
and could count upon no sympathy in my audience, I was 
mortified beyond the pow r er of retort, and became a pas- 
sive butt to the lady's stinging contumely, and the arrowy 
sleet of her gay rhetoric. The narrow bounds of our 
deck made it not easy to get beyond 'talking range ; and 
thus it happened, that for two hours I stood the worst of 
this bright lady's feud. The tables turned. Two ladies 
appeared slowly ascending from the cabin, both in deepest 
mourning, but else as different in aspect as summer and 
winter. The elder was the Countess of Errol, then 
mourning an affliction which had laid her life desolate, 
and admitted of no human consolation. Heavier grief, — 
grief more self-occupied and deaf to all voice of sympa- 



PREMATURE MANHOOD. 159 

thy, I have not happened to witness. She seemed scarcely- 
aware of our presence, except it were by placing herself 
as far as was possible from the annoyance of our odious 
conversation. The circumstances of her loss are now 
forgotten ; at that time they were known to a large circle 
in Bath and London ; and I violate no confidence in 
reviewing them. Lord Errol had been privately intrusted 
by Mr. Pitt with an official secret; — viz., the outline and 
principal details of a foreign expedition ; in which, accord- 
ing to Mr. Pitt's original purpose, his Lordship was to 
have had a high command. In a moment of intoxication 
the Earl confided this secret to some false friend, who 
published the communication and its author. Upon this, 
the unhappy nobleman, under too keen a sense of 
wounded honor, and perhaps with an exaggerated notion 
of the evils attached to his indiscretion, destroyed himself. 
Months had passed since that calamity, when we met his 
widow ; but time appeared to have done nothing in miti- 
gating her sorrow. The younger lady, on the other hand, 

who was Lady ErroPs sister, Heavens ! what a spirit 

of joy and festal pleasure radiated from her eyes, her 
step, her voice, her manner! She was Irish; and the 
very impersonation of innocent gaiety, such as we find 
oftener amongst Irish women than those of any other 
country. Mourning, I have said, she wore ; from sisterly 
consideration, the deepest mourning ; that sole expression 
there was about her of gloom or solemn feeling, — 

But all things else about her drawn, 
From May-time and the cheerful dawn. 

Odious blue-stocking of Belfast and Dublin ! how I hated 
you up to that moment ! half an hour after how grateful I 
felt for the hostility which had procured me such an alli- 
ance. One minute sufficed to put the quick-witted young 



160 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

Irishwoman in possession of our little drama, and the sev- 
eral parts we were playing. To look was to understand, 
to wish was to execute, with this ardent child of nature. 
Like Spenser's Bradamant, with martial scorn, she 
couched her lance on the side of the party suffering 
wrong. Her rank, as sister-in-law to the Constable of 
Scotland, gave her some advantage for winning a favor- 
able audience ; and throwing her segis over me, she ex- 
tended that benefit to myself. Road was now made per 
force for me also ; my replies were no longer stifled in 
noise and laughter. Personalities were banished ; litera- 
ture was extensively discussed ; and that is a subject 
which, offering little room to argument, offers the widest 
to eloquent display. I had immense reading ; vast com- 
mand of words, which somewhat diminished as ideas and 
doubts multiplied ; and, speaking no longer to a deaf 
audience, but to a generous and indulgent protectress, I 
threw out, as from a cornucopia, my illustrative details 
and recollections ; trivial enough perhaps, as I might now 
think, but the more intelligible to my present circle. It 
might seem too much the case of a tempest as in matula, 
if I were to spend any words upon the revolution which 
ensued ; and even the word revolution is too pompous for 
the case. Suffice it, that I remained the lion of that 
company which had previously been most insultingly 
facetious at my expense ; and the intellectual lady finally 
declared the air of the deck unpleasant. 

Never, until this hour, had I thought of women as 
objects of a possible interest, or of a reverential love. I 
had known them either in their infirmities and their un- 
amiable aspects, or else in those sterner relations which 
made them objects of ungcnial and uncompanionable feel- 
ings. Now first it struck me that life might owe half its 
attractions and all its graces to female companionship. 



PREMATURE MANHOOD. 161 

Gazing, perhaps, with too earnest an admiration at this 
generous and spirited young daughter of Ireland, and in 
that way making her those acknowledgments for her 
goodness which I could not properly clothe in words, I 
was roused to a sense of my indecorum by seeing her 

suddenly blush. I believe that Miss Bl interpreted 

my admiration rightly ; for she was not offended ; but, on 
the contrary, for the rest of the day, when not attending 
to her sister, conversed almost exclusively, and in a 

confidential way, with Lord W and myself. The 

whole, in fact, of this conversation must have convinced 
her that I, mere boy as I was, (not quite fifteen,) could 
not have presumed to direct my admiration to her, a fine 
young woman of twenty, in any other character than that 
of a generous champion, and a very adroit mistress in the 
dazzling fence of colloquial skirmish. My admiration 
had, in reality, been altogether addressed to her moral 
qualities, her enthusiasm, her spirit, and her wit. Yet 
that blush, evanescent as it was, — the mere possibility 
that I, so very a child, should have called up the most 
transitory sense of bashfulness or confusion upon any 
female cheek, first, and suddenly as with a flash of light- 
ning, penetrating some utter darkness, illuminated to my 
own startled consciousness, never again to be obscured, the 
pure and powerful ideal of womanhood and womanly ex- 
cellence. This was, in a proper sense, a revelation ; it 
fixed a great era of change in my life ; and this new-born 
idea, being agreeable to the uniform aspirations of my 
own nature — that is, lofty and sublime — it governed my 
life with great power, and with most salutary effects. 
Ever after, throughout the period of youth, I was jealous 
of my own demeanor, reserved, and awe-struck in the 
presence of women ; reverencing often not so much them 
fts my own ideal of woman latent in them, and seldom, 



162 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

indeed, more than imperfectly developed. For I carried 
about with me the idea, to which rarely did I see an 
approximation, of 

A perfect woman, nobly planned, 
To warn, to comfort, to command. 

And from this day I was an altered creature, and never 
again was capable of the careless, irreflective mind of 
childhood. 

Great, doubtless, is the power of each sex over the 
other ; and greater in proportion to the original nobility of 
the nature. But I know not why the dominion of woman 
over man, so far as the contemplation of the reciprocal 
ideals is concerned, seems the more absolute. I know not 
why, also, because it contradicts what one might have 
supposed a priori, the female ideal, (by which much 
abused term I mean the philosophic maximum perfec- 
tionis) seems less earthly and gross, pointing to a possible 
alliance with some higher form of purity and sanctity. 
And yet, according to our scriptural mythus, she was the 
daughter of earth and heaven, whilst man drew his 
parentage directly from heaven. Whence the Miltonic 
address, 

' Daughter of God and man, accomplished Eve.' 

And agreeably to this conception we a're told, by the same 
authentic oracle, that whilst man was ' formed for God 
only,' she, on the contrary, was formed ' for God in him.' 
He drew his irradiation directly from the Deity, she only 
by reflex communication with him. However these are 
curious refinements. But it is a truth of the largest value, 
that the dominion of woman is potent, exactly in that 
decree in which the nature of woman is exalted. That 
woman reigns despotically, never through her image as 



PREMATURE MANHOOD. 163 

abstracted from her actual reality, but through her ideal, 
which is anterior to all actual existences ; that, if there 
were no other detection of the hollow and false basis upon 
which is built savage life and Mahometan life, than merely 
the low and abject ideal of woman essential to those forms 
of humanity, in that alone we should find a sufficient 
refutation of the shallow paradoxes devised for varnishing 
those hideous degenerations of man ; finally, that such as 
woman is will man for ever be ; the one sex being essen- 
tially the antipode and adequate antagonist of the other : 
woman cannot be other than depressed where man is not 
exalted. This last remark I make, that I may not, in 
paying my homage to the other sex, and in glorifying its 
possible power over ours, be confounded with those 
thoughtless and trivial rhetoricians, the soi-disant poets 
of this age, who flatter woman with a false worship ; and 
like Lord Byron's buccaneers, hold out to them a picture 
of their own empire, built only upon sensual or upon 
shadowy excellencies. We find continually a false en- 
thusiasm, a mere dithyrambic inebriation, on behalf of 
woman, put forth by modern verse-writers, expressly at 
the expense of the other sex, as though woman could be 
of porcelain whilst man was of common earthenware. 
Even the testimonies of Ledyard and Park are, in some 
sense, false, though amiable, tributes to female excel- 
lence ; at least they are merely one-sided truths — aspects 
of one phasis, and under a peculiar angle. For, though 
the sexes differ characteristically ; yet they never fail to 
reflect each other ; nor can they differ as to the general 
amount of development ; never yet was woman in one 
stage of elevation, and man (of the same community) in 
another. Thou, therefore, daughter of God and man, all 
potent woman ! reverence thy own ideal ; and, in the 
wildest of the homage which is paid to thee, as also in 



164 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

the most real aspects of thy wide dominion, see no trophy 
of idle vanity, but a silent indication, whether designed or 
not, of the possible grandeur enshrined in thy nature ; 
which realize to the extent of thy power, 

1 And show ns how divine a thing 
A woman may become.' 

Precisely at this stage of my advancement I was, and 
but just entered on that revolution which I have described, 
when, as I have said, 1 became a resident in the family 
of Lord C. Lady C. was a beautiful and still youthful 
woman, who acted upon me powerfully through the new- 
born feelings I have described, and would have done much 
more so, had she not been known to me from my childhood. 
A young Irish peeress, who was visiting at the same time 
in this family, aided Lady C.'s purposes in stimulating my 
ambition upon all the paths which interest the sympathies 
of woman. Lady C. was anxious that I should become a 
sort of Alcibiades, or Aristippus, of ambidexterous powers, 
and capable of shining equally in little things and in great. 
Accordingly, whilst I taught her Greek enough to read the 
Greek Testament, she took measures for my instruction in 
such accomplishments as were usually possessed by the 
men of her circle. In particular, she was anxious that I 
should become a good shot ; and, for this purpose, put me 
under the care of one of her husband's gamekeepers. 
Duly, for many weeks, I accompanied the zealous keeper 
into the L — xt — n woods, and did my best to improve. 
But my progress was slow indeed ; and at last my eyes 
opened clearly to the fact, that my destiny was not in that 
direction which could command the ordinary sympathies 
of this world or of woman, even though accomplished 
woman, moving under common and popular impul 
My sense of Lady C.'s kindness made me persevere in all 



PREMATURE MANHOOD. 165 

the cxercisings and pursuits which she had originated, so 
long as I remained at L — xt — n. But, internally, I felt 
that my sphere was not exactly what she pointed out to my 
ambition, nor the prizes which glittered before my eyes 
exactly such as almost any woman could be expected to 
understand. Even then, in the depths of those Northamp- 
tonshire woods and ridings, oftentimes I exclaimed inter- 
nally, — that, if it were possible for me to work some 
great revolution for man, or to put in motion some great 
agency upon man's condition, equal, for example, in 
power and duration, to that wrought by Mahomet, I would 
set a value upon fame. But else, and as respected the 
little trivial baubles of literary or social honors ; — were 
these only at my disposal, whether it were through defect 
of power in myself, or defect of opportunity, — in that 
case, I would prefer to pass silently through life, by quiet 
paths, and without rousing any babbling echo to my foot- 
steps. Vulgar ambition was already dead within me. 
And living as I did at this time with two young matrons of 
rank, both emphatically fine young women, and one a cele- 
brated beauty, who had seen the first men of the day at 
her feet, and grateful in the liveliest degree, to persons of 
so much distinction, for the interest they condescended to 
show in my future fortunes, I grieved that it should be so. 
However, I dissembled, and lost no part of their regard. 
And, meantime, one great advantage incident to my 
present situation, I took good care to cultivate as much as 
was possible. Northamptonshire, partly from its ad- 
jacency to the finest sporting grounds in England, and 
partly from its relation to the capital, (the distance even at 
that day being easily accomplished between breakfast and 
dinner,) is crowded with a denser resort of the aristocracy 
than any other part of the island. Lord C. was absent at 
his Irish estates in Limerick : and perhaps her own taste 



166 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

would have led Lady C. to stay much at home. But, 
with a view to the amusement of her young Irish friends, 
Lord and Lady M— sy, but chiefly the latter, she ac- 
cepted invitations almost daily. Lord M — sy was often 
called away to London or Ireland ; but I was the invari- 
able attendant of the two ladies ; and thus, under Lady 
C.'s protection, I came to see the English aristocracy, the 
great Houses of Belvoir, (pronounced Beevor,) Burleigh, 
&c, and the crowds of subordinate families, with their 
winter visiters, more extensively than ever I had seen the 
aristocracy of Ireland ; and this with a freedom of inter- 
course which would not have been conceded to me at a 
more advanced age. 



CHAPTER VI. 

TRAVELLING. 

The revolution in the system of travelling, naturally 
suggested by my position in Birmingham, and in the 
whole apparatus, means, machinery, and dependencies of 
that system — a revolution begun, carried through, and 
perfected within the period of my own personal experi- 
ence — merits a word or two of illustration in the most 
cursory memoirs that profess any attention at all to the 
shifting scenery of the age and the principles of motion 
at work, whether manifested in great effects or in little. 
And these particular effects, though little, when regarded 
in their separate details, are not little in their final amount. 
On the contrary, I have always maintained that in a rep- 
resentative government, where the great cities of the 
empire must naturally have the power, each in its pro- 
portion, of reacting upon the capital and the councils of 
the nation in so conspicuous a way, there is a result wait- 
ing on the final improvements of the arts of travelling, 
and of transmitting intelligence with velocity, such as 
cannot be properly appreciated in the absence of all 
historical experience. Conceive a state of communica- 
tion between the centre and the extremities of a great 
people, kept up with a uniformity of reciprocation so ex- 
quisite as to imitate the flowing and ebbing of the sea, or 
the systole and diastole of the human heart ; day and 



168 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

night, waking and sleeping, not succeeding to each other 
with more absolute certainty than the acts of the metropo- 
lis and the controlling notice of the provinces, whether 
in the way of support or of resistance. Action and re- 
action from every point of the compass being thus perfect 
and instantaneous, we should then first begin to under- 
stand, in a practical sense, what is meant by the unity of 
a political body, and we should approach to a more ade- 
quate appreciation of the powers which are latent in 
organization. For it must be considered that hitherto, 
under the most complex organization, and that which has 
best attained its purposes, the national will has never been 
able to express itself upon one in a thousand of the public 
acts, simply because the national voice was lost in the 
distance, and could not collect itself through the time and 
the space rapidly enough to connect itself immediately 
with the evanescent measure of the moment. But as the 
system of intercourse is gradually expanding, these bars 
of space and time are in the same degree contracting, 
until finally we may expect them altogether to vanish : 
and then the whole empire, in every part, will react upon 
the whole through the central forces, with the power, 
life, and effect of immediate conference amongst parties 
brought face to face. Then first will be seen a political 
system truly organic — i. e. in which each acts upon all, 
and all react upon each : and a new earth will arise from 
the indirect agency of this merely physical revolution. 

The reader whose birth attaches him to this present 
generation, having known only Macadamized roads, can- 
not easily bring before his imagination the antique and 
almost aboriginal state of things which marked our travel- 
ling system down to the end of the eighteenth century, 
and nearly through the first decennium of the present. 
A very few lines will suffice for a few broad notices of 



TRAVELLING. 169 

our condition, in this respect, through the last two cen- 
turies. In the Parliament war, (1642-46,) it is an inter- 
esting fact, but at the same time calculated to mislead the 
incautious reader, that many officers of distinction, on 
both sides, brought close carriages to head-quarters ; and 
sometimes they went even upon the field of battle in these 
carriages — not mounting on horseback until the prepa- 
rations were beginning for some important manoeuvre, or 
for a general movement. The same thing had been done 
throughout the thirty years' war, both by the Bavarian, 
Imperial, and afterwards by the Swedish officers of rank. 
And it marks the great diffusion of these luxuries about 
this era, that, on occasion of the reinstalment of two 
princes of Mecklenburg, who had been violently dispos- 
sessed by Wallenstein, upwards of eighty coaches mus- 
tered at a short notice, partly from the territorial nobility, 
partly from the camp. Precisely, however, at military 
head-quarters, and on the route of an army, carriages of 
this description were an available and a most useful means 
of transport. Cumbrous and unwieldy they were, as we 
know by pictures, and they could not have been other- 
wise — they were built to meet the roads. Carriages of 
our present light and reedy [almost, one might say, corky] 
construction, would, on the roads of Germany or of Eng- 
land, in that age, have foundered within the first two 
hours. To our ancestors such carriages would have 
seemed playthings for children. Cumbrous as they were, 
they could not be more so than artillery or baggage wag- 
ons : where these could go, coaches could go. fSo that, 
in the march of an army, there was a perpetual guarantee 
to those who had coaches for the possibility of their tran- 
sit. And hence, and not because the roads were at all 
better than they have been generally described in those 
days, we are to explain the fact — that both in the Royal 
12 



170 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

camp, in Lord Manchester's, and afterwards in Lord 
Fairfax's and Cromwell's, coaches were an ordinary part 
of the camp equipage. The roads, meantime, were as 
they have been described, viz. ditches, morasses, and 
sometimes channels for the course of small rivers. Nor 
did they improve, except for short reaches, and under 
peculiar local advantages, throughout that century. Spite 
of the roads, however, public carriages began to pierce 
England, in various lines, from the era of 1660. Circum- 
stantial notices of these may be found in Lord Auckland's 
large work on the Poor-Laws. That to York for example 
(200 miles) took a fortnight in the journey, or about four- 
teen miles a day. But Chamberlayne, who had a per- 
sonal knowledge of these public carriages, says enough to 
show that, if slow, they were cheap ; half a crown being 
the usual rate for fifteen miles, (i. e. 2d. a mile.) Public 
conveyances, multiplying rapidly, could not but diffuse a 
general call for improved roads ; improved both in dimen- 
sions as well as in the art of construction. For it is 
observable, that so early as Queen Elizabeth's days, 
England already presented to its inhabitants, the most 
equestrian of nations, a general system of decent bridle 
roads. Even at this day, it is doubtful whether any man, 
taking all hinderances into account, and having laid no 
previous relays of horses, could much exceed the exploit 
of Cary, (afterwards Lord Monmouth,) a younger son of 
the first Lord Hunsden, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth. 
This cavalier, basely enough, considering his near con- 
nection with the Queen, had, like a true courtier, promised 
to bring the Scottish King certain intelligence of his ac- 
cession to the English Crown ; and, being a good horse- 
man, he privately resolved to be the earliest, if his interest 
would not avail to make him the official bearer of the 
great intelligence. The Queen died on the last day (as 



TRAVELLING. 171 

it was then considered) of 1602, i. e. on the 24th of 
March, 1603. Cary, though lying under the general 
embargo and interdict of the Privy Council, contrived to 
slip out of the palace, through the favor of his brother, a 
great officer of the Royal household. On the 1st day of 
1603, that is (as we should now call it) on Lady-day, or 
March 25 of 1603, at ten o'clock in the morning, he 
mounted at London, and, on the following day, notwith- 
standing all delays, and that he was very seriously re- 
tarded both by public business on the Border, (where he 
held a great command,) and having been thrown violently 
from his horse, he contrived to reach the Scottish capital 
by the King's bed-time. Altogether he was not more than 
thirty-three or thirty-four hours in traversing a road, at 
that time not at all short of four hundred and fifty miles. 
This story we learn from Lord Monmouth's own memoirs. 
Yet we must not forget that the particular road concerned 
in this exploit was the Great North Road, (as it is still 
called by way of distinction,) lying through Doncaster 
and York, between the northern and southern capitals of 
the island. But roads less frequented were tolerable as 
bridle roads ; whilst all alike, having been originally laid 
down with no view to the broad and ample coaches, from 
1570 to 1700, scratched the panels on each side as they 
crept along. Even in the nineteenth century I have 
known a case, but of course in a sequestered district of 
England, where a post-chaise, of the common narrow 
dimensions, was obliged to retrace its route of fourteen 
miles, on coming to a bridge built in some remote age, 
when, as yet, post-chaises were neither known nor an- 
ticipated, and, unfortunately, too narrow by three or four 
inches. In all the provinces of England, when the soil 
was deep and adhesive, a worse evil beset the stately 
equipage. An Italian of rank, who has left a record of 



172 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

his perilous adventure, visited, or attempted to visit, Pet- 
worth, near London, (then a seat of the Percys, now of 
Lord Egremont,) about the year 1685. I forget how 
many times he was overturned within one particular 
stretch of five miles ; but I remember that it was a sub- 
ject of gratitude, (and, upon meditating a return by the 
same route, a subject of pleasing hope,) to dwell upon 
the soft lying which was to be found in that good-natured 
morass. Yet this was, doubtless, a pet road, (vile pun- 
ster ! dream not that I glance at Pe^worth,) and an im- 
proved road. Such as this, I have good reason to think, 
were most of the roads in England, unless upon the 
rocky strata which stretch northwards from Derbyshire to 
Cumberland and Northumberland. The public carriages 
were the first harbingers of a change for the better ; as 
these grew and prospered, slender lines of improvement 
began to vein and streak the map. And Parliament began 
to show their zeal, though not always a corresponding 
knowledge, by legislating backwards and forwards on the 
breadth of wagon wheel-tires, &,c. But not until our 
cotton system began to put forth blossoms — not until our 
trade and our steam engines began to stimulate the coal 
mines, which, in their turn, stimulated them, did any great 
energy apply itself to our roads. In my childhood, stand- 
ing with one or two of my brothers and sisters at the front 
windows of my mother's carriage, I remember one un- 
varying set of images before us. The postilion (for so 
were all carriages then driven) was employed, not by fits 
and starts, but always and eternally, in quartering, i. e. in 
crossing from side to side, according to the casualties of 
the ground. Before you stretched a wintry length of 
lane, with ruts deep enough to fracture the leg of a horse, 
filled to the brim with standing pools of rain water ; and 
the collateral chambers of these ruts kept from becoming 



TRAVELLING. 173 

confluent by thin ridges, such as the Romans called lirce^ 
to maintain the footing upon which lirce, so as not to 
swerve, (or, as the Romans would say, delirare,) was a 
trial of some skill both for the horses and their postilion. 
It was, indeed, next to impossible for any horse, on such 
a narrow crust of separation, not to grow delirious in the 
Roman metaphor ; and the nervous anxiety which haunted 
me when a child, was much fed by this very image so 
often before my eye, and the sympathy with which I 
followed the motion of the docile creature's legs. Go to 
sleep at the beginning of a stage, and the last thing you 
saw was the line of wintry pools, the poor off- horse plant- 
ing his steps with care, and the cautious postilion gently 
applying his spur, whilst manoeuvring across his system 
of grooves with some sort of science that looked like a 
gipsy's palmistry ; so equally unintelligible to me were his 
motions, in what he sought and in what he avoided. 

Whilst reverting to these remembrances of my child- 
hood, I may add, by way of illustration, and at the risk 
of gossipping, a brief notice of my very first journey. I 
might be then seven years old. A young gentleman, 
the son of a wealthy banker, had to return home for the 
Christmas holidays to a town in Lincolnshire, distant from 
the public school, where he was pursuing his education, 
about a hundred miles. This school was in the neighbor- 
hood of G — nh — y, my father's house. There were at that 
time no coaches in that direction ; now there are many 
every day. The young gentleman advertised for a person 
to share the expense of a post-chaise. By accident, or 
chiefly, I believe, out of compliment to the gentleness of my 
manners, and the depth of my affections, I had an invita- 
tion of some standing to the same town, where I happened to 
have a female relation of mature age, besides some youth- 
ful cousins. The two travellers elect soon heard of each 



174 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

other, and the arrangement was easily completed. It was 
my earliest migration from the paternal (or as I ought 
then to call it, the maternal) roof; and the anxieties of 
pleasure, too tumultuous, with some slight sense of unde- 
fined fears, combined to agitate my childish feelings. I 
had a vague slight apprehension of my fellow-traveller, 
whom I had never seen, and whom my nursery-maid, 
when dressing me, had described in no veiy amiable 
colors. But a good deal more I thought of Sherwood 
Forest, which, as I had been told, we should cross after 
the night set in. At six o'clock I descended, and not, as 
usual, to the children's room, but, on this special morning 
of my life, to a room called the breakfast-room ; where I 
found a blazing fire, candles lighted, and the whole 
breakfast equipage, as if for my mother, set out, to my 
astonishment, for no greater personage than myself. The 
scene being in England, and on a December morning, I 
need scarcely say that it rained ; the rain beat violently 
against the windows, the wind raved ; and an aged ser- 
vant, who did the honors of the breakfast table, pressed 
me urgently and often to eat. I need not say that I had 
no appetite : the fulness of my heart, both from busy 
anticipation, and from the parting which was at hand, had 
made me incapable of any other thought, or feeling, or 
attention, but such as pointed to the coming journey. All 
circumstances in travelling, all scenes and situations of a 
representative and recurring character, are indescribably 
affecting, connected, as they have been, in so many my- 
riads of minds, more especially in a land which is sending 
off for ever its flowers and blossoms to a clime so remote 
as that of India, with heart-rending separations, and with 
farewells never to be repeated. But amongst them all 
none cleaves to my own feelings so indelibly, from 
having repeatedly been concerned, either as witness, or as 



TRAVELLING. 175 

a principal party in its little drama, as the early breakfast, 
on a wintry morning, long before the darkness has given 
way, when the golden blaze of the hearth, and the bright 
glitter of candles, with female ministrations of gentleness 
more touching than on common occasions, all conspire 
to rekindle, as it were for a farewell gleam, the holy 
memorials of household affections. And many have, 
doubtless, had my feelings ; for, I believe few readers 
will ever forget the beautiful manner in which Mrs. Inch- 
bald has treated such a scene in the winding-up of the 
first part of her ' Simple Story,' and the power with which 
she has invested it. 

Thirty-nine, or possibly, I believe, even forty years, 
have passed since that December morning in my own life 
to which I am now recurring, and yet, even to this mo- 
ment, I recollect the audible throbbing of heart, the leap 
and rushing of blood, with which, during a deep lull of the 
wind, the aged attendant said, without hurry or agitation, 
but with something of a solemn tone, * That is the sound 
of wheels. I hear the chaise. Mr. H — 11 will be here 
directly.' The road ran, for some distance, by a course 
pretty nearly equidistant from the house, so that the 
groaning of the wheels continued to catch the ear, as it 
swelled upon the wind, for some time without much alter- 
ation. At length a right-angled turn brought the road 
continually and rapidly nearer to the gates of the grounds, 
which had purposely been thrown open. At this point, 
however, a long career of raving arose ; all other sounds 
were lost ; and, for some time, I began to think we had 
been mistaken, when suddenly the loud trampling of 
horses' feet, as they whirled up the sweep below the win- 
dows, followed by a peal long and loud upon the bell, 
announced, beyond question, the summons for my depar- 
ture. The door being thrown open, steps were heard 



176 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

loud and fast ; and in the next moment, ushered by a 
servant, stalked forward, booted and fully equipped, my 
travelling companion — if such a word can at all express 
the relation between the arrogant young blood, just fresh 
from assuming the toga virilis, and a modest child of 
profound sensibilities, but shy and reserved beyond even 
English reserve. The aged servant, with apparently con- 
strained civility, presented my mother's compliments to 
him, with a request that he would take breakfast. This 
he hastily and rather peremptorily declined. Me, how- 
ever, he condescended to notice with an approving nod, 
slightly inquiring if I were the young gentleman who 
shared his post-chaise. But, without allowing time for an 
answer, and striking his boot impatiently with a riding- 
whip, he hoped I was ready. c Not until he has gone up 
to my mistress,' replied my old protector, in a tone of 
some asperity. Thither I ascended. What counsels and 
directions I might happen to receive at the maternal toilet, 
naturally I have forgotten. The most memorable circum- 
stance to me was, that I, who had never till that time 
possessed the least or most contemptible coin, received, in 
a net-work purse, five glittering guineas, with instructions 
to put three immediately into Mr. H — ll's hands, and the 
rest when he should call for them. 

The rest of my mother's counsels, if deep, were not 
long ; she, who had always something of a Roman firm- 
ness, shed more milk of roses, I believe, upon my cheeks 
than tears ; and why not ? What should there be to her 
corresponding to an ignorant child's sense of pathos, in a 
little journey of about a hundred miles ? Outside her 
door, however, there awaited me some silly creatures, 
women of course, old and young, from the nursery and 
the kitchen, who gave and who received those fervent 
kisses, which wait only upon love without awe and with- 



TRAVELLING. 177 

out disguise. Heavens ! what rosaries might be strung for 
the memory of sweet female kisses, given without check 
or art, before one is of an age to value them ! And again, 
how sweet is the touch of female hands as they array one 
for a journey ! If anything needs fastening, whether by 
pinning, tying, or any other contrivance, how perfect is 
one's confidence in female skill ; as if by mere virtue of 
her sex and feminine instinct, a woman could not possibly 
fail to know the best and readiest way of adjusting every 
case that could arise in dress. Mine was hastily completed 
amongst them ; each had a pin to draw from her bosom, in 
order to put something to rights about my throat or hands ; 
and a chorus of God bless hums' was arising, when, from 
below, young Mephistopheles murmured an impatient 
groan, and perhaps the horses snorted. I found myself 
lifted into the chaise : counsels about the night and the 
cold, flowing in upon me, to which Mephistopheles lis- 
tened with derision or astonishment. I and he had each 
our separate corner; and, except to request that I would 
draw up one of the glasses, I do not think he conde- 
scended to address one word to me until dusk, when we 
found ourselves rattling into Chesterfield, having barely 
accomplished four stages, or forty or forty-two miles, in 
about nine hours. This, except on the Bath or great 
north roads, may be taken as a standard amount of per- 
formance, in 1794, (the year I am recording,) and even 
ten years later. In these present hurrying and tumul- 
tuous days, whether time is really of more value, I 
cannot say ; but all people on the establishment of inns 
are required to suppose it of the most awful value. 
Now-a-days, no sooner have the horses stopped at the 
gateway of a posting-house, than a summons is passed 
down to the stables ; and in less than one minute, upon a 
great road, the horses next in rotation, always ready 



178 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

harnessed, when expecting to come on duty, are heard 
trotting down the yard. « Putting to,' and transferring 
the luggage, (supposing your conveyance a common post- 
chaise,) once a work of at least twenty minutes, is now 
easily accomplished in three. And scarcely have you 
paid the ex-postilion before his successor has mounted ; 
the ostler is standing ready with the steps in his hands, to 
receive his invariable sixpence ; the door is closed ; the 
representative waiter bows his acknowledgment for the 
house, and you are off at a pace never less than ten 
miles an hour ; the total detention at each stage not 
averaging above four minutes. Then (i. e. at the latter 
end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth 
century) half an hour was the minimum of time spent at 
each change of horses. Your arrival produced a great 
bustle of unloading and unharnessing ; as a matter of 
course, you alighted and went into the inn ; if you sallied 
out to report progress, after waiting twenty minutes, no 
signs appeared of any stir about the stables. The most 
choleric person could not much expedite preparations, 
which loitered not so much from any indolence in the 
attendants as from faulty arrangements and total defect of 
foresight. The pace was such as the roads of that day 
allowed ; never so much as six miles an hour, except 
upon a very great road ; and then only by extra payment 
to the driver. Yet even under this comparatively miser- 
able system, how superior was England, as a land for the 
traveller, to all the rest of the world, Sweden only ex- 
cepted. Bad as were the roads, and defective as were 
all the arrangements, still you had these advantages ; no 
town so insignificant, no posting-house so solitary, but that 
at all seasons, except a contested election, it could furnish 
horses without delay, and without license to distress the 
neighboring farmers. On the worst road, and on a win- 



TRAVELLING. 179 

ter's day, with no more than a single pair of horses, you 
generally made out sixty miles ; even if it were necessary 
to travel through the night, you could continue to make 
way, although more slowly ; and finally, if you were of 
a temper to brook delay, and did not exact from all 
persons the haste or energy of Hotspurs, the whole system 
in those days was full of respectability and luxurious ease, 
and well fitted to renew the image of the home you had 
left, if not in its elegancies, yet in all its substantial com- 
forts. What cozy old parlors in those days ! low-roofed, 
glowing with ample fires, and fenced from the blasts of 
doors by screens, whose foldings were, or seemed to be, 
infinite ! What motherly landladies ! won, how readily, 
to kindness the most lavish, by the mere attractions of 
simplicity and youthful innocence, and finding so much 
interest in the bare circumstance of being a traveller at a 
childish age ! Then what blooming young handmaidens, 
how different from the knowing and worldly demireps of 
modern high roads ! And sometimes gray-headed faithful 
waiters, how sincere and how attentive, by comparison 
with their flippant successors, the eternal ' Coming, sir, 
Coming, sir,' of our improved generation. 

Such an honest, old butler-looking servant waited on us 
during dinner at Chesterfield, carving for me, and urging 
me to eat. Even Mephistopheles found his pride relax 
under the influence of wine ; and when loosened from this 
restraint, his kindness was not deficient. To me he 
showed it in pressing wine upon me, without stint or 
measure. The elegancies which he had observed in such 
part of my mother's establishment, as could be supposed 
to meet his eye on so hasty a visit, had impressed him 
perhaps favorably towards myself: and could I have a 
little altered my age, or dismissed my excessive reserve, I 
doubt not that he would have admitted me, in default of a 



180 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

more suitable comrade, to his entire confidence for the 
rest of the road. Dinner finished, and myself at least, for 
the first time in my childish life, somewhat perhaps over- 
charged with wine, the bill was called for — the waiter 
paid in the lavish style of antique England — and we 
heard our chaise drawing up under the gateway — the 
invariable custom of those days, by which you were spared 
the trouble of going into the street, stepping from the hall 
of the inn, right into your carriage. I had been kept 
back for a minute or so by the landlady, and her attendant 
nymphs, to be dressed and kissed ; and, on seating myself 
in the chaise which was well lighted with lamps, I found 
my lordly young principal in conversation with the land- 
lord, first upon the price of oats, which youthful horsemen 
always affect to inquire after with interest, but secondly, 
upon a topic more immediately at his heart — viz., the 
reputation of the road. At that time of day, when gold 
had not yet disappeared from the circulation, no traveller 
carried any other sort of money about him ; and there 
was consequently a rich encouragement to highwaymen, 
which vanished almost entirely with Mr. Pitt's act of 1797, 
for restricting cash payments. Property which could be 
identified and traced, was a perilous sort of plunder ; and 
from that time the free-trade of the road almost perished 
as a regular occupation. At this period it did certainly 
maintain a languishing existence ; here and there it might 
have a casual run of success : and, as these local ebbs 
and flows were continually shifting, perhaps, after all, the 
trade might lie amongst a small number of hands. Uni- 
versally, however, the landlords showed some shrewdness, 
or even sagacity, in qualifying, according to the circum- 
stances of the inquirer, the sort of credit which they 
allowed to the exaggerated ill-fame of the roads. Return- 
ing on this very road, some months after, with a timid 



TRAVELLING. 181 

female relation, who put her questions with undisguised 
and distressing alarm, the very same people, one and all, 
assured her that the danger was next to nothing. Not so 
at present : rightly presuming that a haughty cavalier of 
eighteen, flushed with wine and youthful blood, would 
listen with disgust to a picture too amiable and pacific of 
the roads before him, Mr. Spread-Eagle replied with the 
air of one who feared more than he altogether liked to 
tell, and looking suspiciously amongst the strange faces lit 
up by the light of the carriage lamps — c Why, Sir, there 
have been ugly stories afloat ; I cannot deny it : and some- 
times, you know, Sir,' winking sagaciously, to which a 
knowing nod of assent was returned, ' it may not be quite 
safe to tell all one knows. But you can understand me. 
The forest, you are well aware, Sir, is the forest : it never 
was much to be trusted, by all accounts, in my father's 
time, and I suppose will not be better in mine. But you 
must keep a sharp lookout: and, Tom,' speaking to the 
postilion, ' mind, when you pass the third gate, to go 
pretty smartly by the thicket.' Tom replied in a tone of 
importance to this professional appeal. General valedic- 
tions were exchanged, the landlord bowed, and we moved 
off for the forest. Mephistopheles had his travelling case 
of pistols. These he began now to examine ; for some- 
times, said he, I have known such a trick as drawing the 
charge whilst one happened to be taking a glass of wine. 
Wine had unlocked his heart — the prospect of the forest 
and the advancing night excited him — and even of such 
a child as myself, he was now disposed to make a con- 
fidant. 4 Did you observe,' said he, c that ill-looking 
fellow, as big as a camel, who stood on the landlord's left 
hand ? ' Was it the man, I asked timidly, who seemed by 
his dress to be a farmer ? l Farmer, you call him ? Ah ! 
my young friend, that shows your little knowledge of the 



182 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

world. He is a scoundrel, the bloodiest of scoundrels. 
And so I trust to convince him before many hours are 
gone over our heads.' Whilst saying this, he employed 
himself in priming his pistols : then, after a pause, he went 
on thus : — ' No, my young friend, this alone shows his 
base purposes — his calling himself a farmer. Farmer, 
he is not, but a desperate highwayman, of which I have 
full proof. I watched his malicious glances, whilst the 
landlord was talking ; and I could swear to his traitorous 
intentions.' So speaking, he threw anxious glances on 
each side as we continued to advance : we were both 
somewhat excited; he by the spirit of adventure, I by 
sympathy with him — and both by wine. The wine, how- 
ever, soon applied a remedy to its own delusions : three 
miles from the town we had left, both of us were in a bad 
condition for resisting highwaymen with effect — we were 
fast asleep. Suddenly a most abrupt halt awoke us — 
Mephistopheles felt for his pistols — the door flew open, 
and the lights of the assembled group announced to us that 
we had reached Mansfield. That night we went on to 
Newark, at which place about forty miles of our journey 
remained. This distance we performed, of course, on the 
following day, between breakfast and dinner. But it 
serves strikingly to illustrate the state of roads in England, 
whenever your affairs led you into districts a little retired 
from the capital routes of the public travelling — that, for 
one twenty-mile stage, viz., from Newark to Sleaford, they 
refused to take us forward with less than four horses. 
This was neither a fraud, as our eyes soon convinced us, 
(for even four horses could scarcely extricate the chaise 
from the deep sloughs which occasionally seamed the road 
for tracts of two or three miles in succession,) nor was it 
an accident of the weather. In all seasons the same 
demand was enforced, as my female protectress found in 



TRAVELLING. 183 

conducting me back at a fine season of the year, and had 
always found in traversing the same route. The England 
of that date (1794) exhibited many similar cases. At 
present there is but one stage in all England, where a 
traveller, without regard to weight, is called upon to take 
four horses ; and that is at Ambleside, in going by the 
direct road to Carlisle. The first stage to Patterdale lies 
over the mountain of Kirkstone, and the ascent is not only 
toilsome, (continuing for above three miles, with occa- 
sional intermissions,) but at times is carried over summits 
too steep for a road by all the rules of engineering, and 
yet too little frequented to offer any means of repaying 
the cost of smoothing the difficulties. 

It was not until after the year 1815 that the main 
improvement took place in the English travelling system, 
so far as regarded speed. It is, in reality, to Mr. M'Adam 
that we owe it. All the roads in England, within a few 
years, were remodelled, and upon principles of Roman 
science. From mere beds of torrents, and systems of 
ruts, they were raised universally to the condition and 
appearance of gravel walks in private parks or shrub- 
beries. The average rate of velocity was, in consequence, 
exactly doubled — -ten miles an hour being now generally 
accomplished, instead of five. And at the moment when 
all further improvement upon this system had become 
hopeless, a new prospect was suddenly opened to us by 
railroads ; which again, considering how much they have 
already exceeded the maximum of possibility, as laid down 
by all engineers during the progress of the Manchester 
and Liverpool line, may soon give way to new modes 
of locomotion still more astonishing to our preconcep- 
tions. 

One point of refinement, as regards the comfort of trav- 
ellers, remains to be mentioned, in which the improve- 



184 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

merit began a good deal earlier, perhaps by ten years, 
than in the construction of the roads. Luxurious as was 
the system of English travelling at all periods, after the 
general establishment of post-chaises, it must be granted 
that, in the circumstance of cleanliness, there was far 
from being that attention, or that provision for the travel- 
ler's comfort, which might have been anticipated from the 
general habits of the country. I, at all periods of my life, 
a great traveller, was witness to the first steps and the 
whole struggle of this revolution. Marechal Saxe pro- 
fessed always to look under his bed, applying his caution 
chiefly to the attempts of robbers. Now, if at the greatest 
inns of England you had, in the days I speak of, adopted 
this Marechal's policy of reconnoitring, what w r ould you 
have seen ? Beyond a doubt you would have seen what, 
upon all principles of seniority, was entitled to your ven- 
eration, viz., a dense accumulation of dust far older than 
yourself. A foreign author made some experiments upon 
the deposition of dust, and the rate of its accumulation, in 
a room left wholly undisturbed. If I recollect, a century 
would produce a stratum about half an inch in depth. 
Upon this principle, I conjecture that much dust which I 
have seen in inns, during the first four or five years of the 
present century, must have belonged to the reign of George 
II. It was, however, upon travellers by coaches that the 
full oppression of the old vicious system operated. The 
elder Scaliger mentions, as a characteristic of the English 
in his day, a horror of ablution in cold water. Nowhere 
could he and his foreign companions obtain the luxury of 
cold water for washing their hands, either before or after 
dinner. One day he and his party dined with the Lord 
Chancellor ; and now, thought he, for very shame they will 
allow us some means of purification. Not at all : the 
Chancellor viewed this outlandish novelty with the same 



TRAVELLING. 185 

jealousy as others. However, on the earnest petition of 
Scaliger, he made an order that a basin or other vessel of 
cold water should be produced. His household bowed to 
this judgment, and a slop basin was cautiously introduced. 
c What ! ' said Scaliger, 8 only one, and we so many ? ' 
Even that one contained but a tea-cup full of water ; but 
the great scholar soon found that he must be thankful for 
what he had got. It had cost the whole strength of the 
English Chancery to produce that single cup of water; 
and for that day, no man in his senses could look for a 
second. Pretty much the same struggle, and for the same 
cheap reform, commenced about the year 1805-6. Post- 
chaise travellers could, of course, have what they liked, 
and generally they asked for a bed-room. It is of coach 
travellers I speak. And the particular innovation in ques- 
tion commenced, as was natural, with the mail-coach, 
which, from the much higher scale of its fares, com- 
manded a much more select class of company. I was a 
party to the very earliest attempts at breaking ground in 
this alarming revolution. Well do I remember the aston- 
ishment of some waiters, the indignation of others, the 
sympathetic uproars which spread to the bar, to the 
kitchen, and even to the stables, at the first opening of 
our extravagant demands. Sometimes even the landlady 
thought the case worthy of her interference, and came 
forward to remonstrate with us upon our unheard-of con- 
duct. But gradually we made way. Like Scaliger, at 
first we got but one basin amongst us, and that one was 
brought into the break fast- room ; but scarcely had two 
years revolved before we began to see four, and all appur- 
tenances, arranged duly in correspondence to the number 
of inside passengers by the mail : and, as outside travelling 
was continually gaining ground amongst the wealthier 
classes, more comprehensive arrangements were often 
13 



186 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

made ; though, even to this day, so much influence sur- 
vives, from the original aristocratic principle upon which 
public carriages were constructed, that, on the mail- 
coaches there still prevails the most scandalous inattention 
to the comfort, and even to the security, of the outside 
passengers : a slippery glazed roof frequently makes the 
sitting a matter of effort and anxiety, whilst the little iron 
side-rail of four inches in height serves no one purpose 
but that of bruising the thigh. Concurrently with these 
reforms in the system of personal cleanliness, others were 
silently making way through all departments of the house- 
hold economy. Dust, from the reign of George II. , 
became scarcer ; gradually it came to bear an antiquarian 
value : basins and vases de nuit lost their grim appear- 
ance, and looked as clean as in gentlemen's houses. And 
at length the whole system was so thoroughly ventilated 
and purified, that all good inns, nay, generally speaking, 
even second-rate inns, at this day, reflect the best features, 
to cleanliness and neatness, of well-managed private 
establishments. 



CHAPTER VII. 

MY BROTHER 

The reader who may have accompanied me in these 
wandering memorials of my one life and casual experi- 
ences, will be aware that I have brought them forward 
with little regard to their exact order of succession. In 
reference to that particular object which governed me in 
bringing them forward at all — an object which I shall, 
perhaps, explain pointedly in my closing paper — it was 
of very little importance to consult the chronologies of the 
case, except in so far as sometimes it may have happen- 
ed that the precise dates of a transaction were of some 
negative * value towards its verification. Consequently, I 
have wandered backwards and forwards, obeying any 
momentary impulse, as accident or sometimes even as 
purely verbal suggestions might arise to guide me. But, 
in many cases, this neglect of chronological order is not 
merely permitted — it is in fact to some degree inevitable ; 
for there are cases which, as a whole, connect themselves 
with my own life, at so many different eras, that, upon 

* ' Negative! — why negative value ? ' I hear some young readers ex- 
claim. As it is always of importance to cultivate accuracy of think- 
ing, and as I never wish to use words (wrong or right otherwise) without 
a distinct meaning, I reply that the chronology has a negative value in 
this sense: being false, it would have upset the story — although, being 
true, it did not establish that story. 



188 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

any chronological principle of position, it would have 
been difficult to assign them a proper place — backwards 
or forwards they must have leaped, in whatever place 
they had been introduced ; and in their entire compass, 
from first to last, never could have been represented as 
properly belonging to any one present time, whensoever 
that had been selected. In reality, as a man must be 
aware beforehand, that, amongst the incidents of any life 
connected with each other by no logical connection, there 
can be no logical transitions from one to the other, so also, 
upon examining any particular life, one of those admira- 
ble lives, for instance, by Dr. Johnson, he will find that, in 
fact, the mere incidents are not connected, nor could be, 
any more than the items in an auctioneer's catalogue. 
How, then, is it that any seeming connection is effected ? 
How is it, at the least, that they read with a sense of 
unbroken continuous fluency ? Simply thus — and here 
lies the main secret of good biography : a moral is drawn, 
a philosophic inference, from some particular incident ; 
this inference, for the very reason that it is philosophic, 
will be large and general ; it may therefore be so framed 
as to include, by anticipation, some kindred thought, that 
will apply as an introducing moral to the succeeding 
incident ; or it may be itself so large and comprehensive 
an idea, so ambidexter in its sense, as to bear a Janus-like 
application, one aspect pointing backwards to No. 1, one 
forwards to No. 2. Thus, to take a coarse, obvious 
illustration : a story, we will suppose, is told of riotous 
profusion ; and next — without any imaginable natural 
connection or sequence, so that, left to themselves, they 
would read like parts of a technical advertisement — there 
comes a story of some private brawl in a tavern, ending 
in murder. But these detached notices are fused into 
unity, by a philosophic regret that the subject of memoir 



MY BROTHER. 189 

should have been led into aspirations after a kind of 
society which had tempted him equally (looking back- 
wards to No. 1) into disproportionate expenses, and (look- 
ing forward to No. 2) amongst pretensions in point of 
rank, issuing naturally into insults unendurable by a gene- 
rous nature. Such a remark, interposed between the two 
incidents, Nos. 1 and 2, connects them — brings them 
into relation to a common principle, and makes into parts 
of one whole, incidents that would else have been utterly 
disjointed. And thus it is, by the setting, and not by the 
jewels set, that the whole course of a life is woven into 
one texture.* In fact, the connections of a life, when 
they are not of the vulgar order — in this year he did 
thus, in the next year he did thus — must resolve them- 
selves into intellectual abstractions — into those meditative 
reflections upon the whirling motions of life which rise 
from them like a perpetual spray or atmosphere, such 
as is thrown off from a cataract, and which invests all 
surrounding objects. Thus, and it is noticeable, the re- 
flections which arise may be made, and in the hands of a 
great poet like Shakspeare, are made, to anticipate and 
mould the course of what is to follow. The reflections, 
or reflex thoughts, pure reverberations, as it were, of 
what has passed, are so treated as to become anticipations 
and pregnant sources of what is to follow. They seem 
to be mere passive results or products from the narration ; 

* There is an essay by Mr. Coleridge, in his revised edition of ' The 
Friend,' which contains elements of a deep philosophy, and which he 
himself (I believe) regarded as the profoundest effort of thought he had 
published to the world, illustrating principles pretty similar to those, 
but with a reference not to the art of biography so much (not at all, 
perhaps) as to the art of narration ; and most admirably it is illustrated, 
in particular from the narration of Hamlet to Horatio, with respect to 
his sea adventures with Rosincrantz and Guildenstern. I speak from a 
recollection of nineteen years. 



190 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

but, properly managed, they assume the very opposite 
relation, and predetermine the course of that narration. 
Now, if chronology is thus incapable of furnishing that 
principle of connection amongst the facts of a life, which, 
on some principle or other, must be had, in order to give 
any unity to its parts, and to take away the distraction of 
a mere catalogue ; if, at any rate, something more than 
chronology must be resorted to, then it follows that chro- 
nology may be safely neglected in general; and, a for- 
tiori, may be neglected with respect to those cases which, 
belonging to every place alike, therefore belong, accord- 
ing to the proverb, to no place at aii, or, (reversing this 
proverb,) belonging to no place by preferable right, do, in 
fact, belong to every place. 

The incidents I am now going to relate come under 
this rule ; for they form part of a story which fell in with 
my own life at many different points. It is a story taken 
from the life of my own brother — and I dwell on it with 
the more willingness, because it furnishes an indirect les- 
son upon a great principle of social life, now and for 
many years back sub judice, and struggling for its just 
supremacy — the principle that all corporal punishments 
whatsoever, and upon whomsoever inflicted, are hateful, 
and an indignity to our common nature — enshrined in 
the person of the sufferer. I will not here add one word 
upon the general thesis, but go on to the facts of this 
case, which, if all its incidents could be now recovered, 
was perhaps as romantic as any that ever has been told. 
But its moral interest depends upon this — that, simply 
out of one brutal chastisement, arose naturally the entire 
series of events which so very nearly made shipwreck of 
all hope for one individual, and did in fact poison the tran- 
quillity of a whole family for seven years. My next 
brother, younger by about four years than myself, was a 



MY BROTHER. 191 

boy of exquisite and delicate beauty — delicate, that is, 
in respect to its feminine elegance and bloom ; for else, 
(as regards constitution) he turned out remarkably robust. 
In such excess did his beauty flourish during childhood, 
that those, who remember him and myself at the public 
school of Bath, will also remember the ludicrous molesta- 
tion in the streets, (for to him it was molestation,) which 
it entailed upon him — ladies stopping continually to kiss 
him. The relation with whom we came to Bath from a 
remote quarter of the kingdom, occupied at first the very 
apartments on the North Parade, just quitted by Edmund 
Burke at the point of death. That circumstance, or the 
expectation of finding Burke still there, brought for some 
weeks crowds of inquirers, many of whom saw the child- 
ish Adonis, then scarcely seven years old, and inflicted 
upon him what he viewed as the martyrdom of their 
caresses. Thus began a persecution which continued as 
long as his years allowed it. The most brilliant com- 
plexion that could be imagined, the features of an Anti- 
nous, and perfect symmetry of figure at that period of his 
life (afterwards he lost it) made him the subject of 
never-ending admiration to the whole female population, 
gentle and simple, who passed him in the streets. In after 
days, he had the grace to regret his own perverse and 
scornful coyness — what Roman poets would have called 
his protervitas. But, at that time, so foolishly insensible 
was he to the honor, that he used to kick and struggle 
with all his might to liberate himself from the gentle 
violence which was continually offered, and he renewed 
the scene so elaborately painted by Shakspeare, of the 
conflicts between Venus and Adonis. For two years, this 
continued a subject of irritation the keenest on the one 
side, and of laughter on the other, between my brother 
and his uglier school-fellows, myself being amongst them. 



192 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

Not that we had the slightest jealousy on the subject — far 
from it : it struck us all (as it generally does strike boys) 
in the light of an attaint upon the dignity of a male, that 
he should be subjected to the caressses of women, without 
leave asked : this was felt to be a badge of childhood, 
and a proof that the object of such fondling tenderness, 
so public and avowed, must be regarded in the light of a 
baby — not to mention that the very foundation of all this 
distinction, a beautiful face, is as a male distinction re- 
garded in a very questionable light by multitudes, and 
often by those most who are the possessors of that dis- 
tinction. Certainly that was the fact in my brother's case. 
Not one of us could feel so pointedly as himself the 
ridicule of his situation ; nor did he cease, when increas- 
ing years had liberated him from that practical expression 
of homage to his beauty, to regard the beauty itself as a 
degradation ; nor could he bear to be flattered upon it, 
though, in reality, it did him service in after distresses, 
when no other endowment whatsoever would have been 
availing. Often, in fact, do men's natures sternly con- 
tradict the promise of their features ; for no person would 
have believed that, under the blooming loveliness of a 
Narcissus, lay shrouded, as I firmly believe there did, 
the soul of a hero ; as much courage as a man could 
have, with a capacity of patient submission to hardship, 
and of wrestling with calamity, that ' is rarely found 
amongst the endowments of youth. I have reason, also, 
to think that the state of degradation in which he believed 
himself to have passed his childish years, from the sort of 
public petting which I have described, and his strong re- 
coil from it as an insult, went much deeper than was 
supposed, and had much to do in his subsequent conduct, 
and in nerving him to the strong resolutions he adopted. 
He seemed to resent as an original insult of Nature, the 



MY BROTHER. 193 

having given him a false index of character in his fem- 
inine beauty, and to take a pleasure in contradicting it. 
Had it been in his power, I am sure he would have spoiled 
it. Certain it is, that from the time he reached his elev- 
enth birthday, he had begun already to withdraw himself 
from the society of all other boys — to fall into long fits 
of abstraction — and to throw himself upon his own 
resources in a way neither usual nor necessary. School- 
fellows of his own age and standing — those even who 
were the most amiable — he shunned ; and, many years 
after his disappearance, I found, in his handwriting, a col- 
lection of fragments, couched in a sort of wild lyrical 
verses, presenting, unquestionably, the most extraordinary 
evidences of a proud, self-sustained mind, consciously 
concentring his own hopes in himself and abjuring the 
rest of the world, that can ever have emanated from so 
young a person ; since, upon the largest concession, and 
supposing them to have been written on the eve of his 
quitting England, which, however, w r as hardly compatible 
with the situation where they were found — even in that 
case, they must have been written at the age of thirteen. 
I have often speculated on the subject of these mysterious 
compositions ; they were of a nature to have proceeded 
rather from some mystical quietist, such as Madame 
Guyon, if one can suppose the union with this rapt devo- 
tion of a rebellious spirit of worldly aspiration : passion- 
ate apostrophes there were, to nature and the powers of 
nature ; and what seemed strangest of all was — that, in 
style, not only were they free from all tumor and inflation 
which might have been looked for in so young a writer, 
but were even wilfully childish and colloquial in a pathetic 
degree — in fact, in point of tone, allowing for the differ- 
ence between a narrative poem and a lyrical, they some- 



194 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

what resembled that very beautiful and little-known* 
poem of George Herbert, in which he describes symbol- 
ically to a friend, under the form of treacherous ill usage 
he had suspected, the religious processes by which a soul 
is weaned from the world. Taken as a whole, they most 
remind me of ■ Lewti,' a joint poem by Coleridge and 
Wordsworth. The most obvious solution of the mystery 
would be, to suppose these fragments to have been copied 
from some obscure author : but, besides that no author 
could have remained obscure in this age of elaborate re- 
search, who had been capable of sighs, (for such I may call 
them,) drawn up from such well-like recesses of feeling, 
and expressed with such dithyrambic fervor and exquisite 
simplicity of language — there was another testimony to 
their being the productions of him who owned the pen- 
manship ; which was, that some of the papers exhibited 
the whole process of creation and growth, such as era- 
sures, substitutions, doubts expressed as to this and that 
form of expression, together with references backwards 
and forwards. Xow, that the handwriting was my 
brother's, admitted of no doubt whatsoever. I now go on 
with his story. — In 1S00, my visit to Ireland, and visits to 
other places subsequently, separated me from him for 
above a year. In 1S01, we were at very different schools: 
I in the highest class of a great public school — he at a 
very sequestered parsonage in a northern county. This 
situation, probably, fed and cherished his melancholy 
habits ; for he had no society except that of a younger 
brother, who would give him no disturbance at all. The 
development of our national resources had not yet gone 
so far as absolutely to exterminate from the map of Eng- 

* This poem, from great admiration of its mother English, and to 
illustrate some ideas upon style, Mr. Coleridge republished in his Bio- 
grapkia Liter aria. 



MY BROTHER. 195 

land everything like a heath, a breezy down, (such as 
gave so peculiar a character to the counties of Wilts, 
Somerset, Dorset, &c.,) or even a village common. 
Heaths were yet to be found in England, not so spacious, 
indeed, as the landes of France, but as wild and romantic. 
In such a situation my brother lived, and under the tuition 
of a clergyman, retired in his habits, and even ascetic, 
but gentle in his manners. (To that I can speak myself; 
for, in the winter of 1801, I dined with him, and I found 
that his yoke was, indeed, a mild one ; since, even to my 
youngest brother, a headstrong child of seven, he used no 
stronger remonstrance in urging him to some essential 
point of duty, than ' Do be persuaded, sirS) Here, there- 
fore was the best of all possible situations for my brother's 
wayward and haughty nature. The clergyman was 
learned, quiet, absorbed in his studies ; humble and mod- 
est beyond the proprieties of his situation ; and treating 
my brother in all points as a companion : whilst, on the 
other hand, my brother was not the person to forget the 
respect due, by a triple title, to a clergyman, a scholar, 
and his own preceptor — one, besides, who so little 
thought of exacting it. How happy might all parties 
have been — what suffering, what danger, what years of 
miserable anxiety might have been spared to all who were 
interested — had the guardians and executors of my 
father's will thought fit to ' let well alone ! ' But, ' per 
star meglio? * they chose to remove my brother from 
this gentle recluse to an active, bustling man of the world, 
the very anti-pole in character. What might be the pre- 
tensions of this gentleman to scholarship, I never had any 
means of judging ; and, considering that he must now, (if 



* The well-known Italian epitaph — { Statm bene: ma, per starmeglio, 
sto qui.' 



196 LIFE AHS MANNERS. 

living at all,) at a distance of thirty-six years, be gray- 
headed, I shall respect his age so far as to suppress his 
name. He was of a class now annually declining (and I 
hope, rapidly) to extinction. Thanks be to God, in that 
point, at least, for the dignity of human nature, that, 
amongst the many, many cases of reform held by some 
of us, or destined, however, in defiance of all opinions, 
eventually to turn out chimerical, this one, at least, never 
can be defeated, injured, or eclipsed. As man grows 
more intellectual, the power of managing him by his in- 
tellect and his moral nature, in utter contempt of all 
appeals to his mere animal instincts of pain, must go on 
pari passu. And, if a ■ Te Deum,' or an ■ O, Jubilate ! ' 
were to be celebrated by all nations and languages for 
any one advance and absolute conquest over wrong and 
error won by human nature in our times — yes, not 
excepting 

1 The bloody writing by all nations torn ? — 

the abolition of the commerce in slaves — to my thinking, 
that festival should be for the mighty progress made 
towards the suppression of brutal, bestial modes of pun- 
ishment. Nay, I may call them worse than bestial ; for 
a man of any goodness of nature does not willingly or 
needlessly resort to the spur or the lash with his horse or 
with his hound. But, with respect to man, if he will not 
be moved or won over by conciliatory means, by means 
that presuppose him a reasonable creature, then let him 
die, confounded in his own vileness : but let not me, let 
not the man (that is to say) who has him in his power, 
dishonor himself by inflicting punishments, violating that 
imaore of human nature which., not in anv vague rhetori- 
cal sense, but upon a religious principle of duty, (the 
human person is expressly exalted in Scripture, under 



MY BROTHER. 197 

the notion that it is 4 the temple of the Holy Ghost,') 
ought to be a consecrated thing in the eyes of all good 
men ; and of this, we may be assured — this, which I am 
now going to say, is more sure than day or night — that, 
in proportion as man, as man, is honored, raised, exalted, 
trusted, in that proportion will he become more worthy of 
honor, of exaltation, of trust. 

Well, this schoolmaster had very different views of man 
and his nature. He not only thought that physical co- 
ercion was the one sole engine by which man could be 
managed, but — on the principle of that common maxim 
which declares that, when two schoolboys meet, with 
powers at all near to a balance, no peace can be expected 
between them until it is fairly put to the trial, and settled 
who is the master — on that same principle, he fancied 
that no pupil could adequately or proportionably reverence 
his master, until he had settled the precise proportion of 
superiority in animal powers by which his master was in 
advance of himself. Strength of blows only could ascer- 
tain that : and, as he was not very nice about creating his 
opportunities, as he plunged at once ' in medias res? 
and more especially when he saw or suspected any rebel- 
lious tendencies, he soon picked a quarrel with my un- 
fortunate brother. Not, be it observed, that he much 
cared for a well-looking or respectable quarrel. No. I 
have been assured that, even when the most fawning 
obsequiousness had appealed to his clemency, in the per- 
son of some timorous new-comer, appalled by the reports 
he had heard — even in such cases, (deeming it wise to 
impress, from the beginning, a salutary awe of his Jovian 
thunders,) he made a practice of doing thus : — He would 
speak loud, utter some order, not very clearly, perhaps, 
as respected the sound, but with perfect perplexity as 
regarded the sense, to the timid, sensitive boy upon 



198 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

whom he intended to fix a charge of disobedience. ' Sir, 
if you please, what was it that you said ? ' — l What was 
it that I said ? What ! playing upon my words ? Chop- 
ping logic ? Strip, sir ; strip this instant.' Thencefor- 
ward this timid boy became a serviceable instrument in 
his equipage. Not only was he a proof, even without 
co-operation on the master's part, that extreme cases of 
submission could not insure mercy, but also he, this boy, 
in his own person, breathed forth, at intervals, a dim sense 
of awe and worship — the religion of fear — towards the 
grim Moloch of the scene. Hence, as by electrical con- 
ductors, was conveyed throughout every region of the 
establishment a tremulous sensibility that vibrated towards 
the centre. Different, O Rowland Hill ! are the laws of 
thy establishment ; far other are the echoes heard amid 
the ancient halls of Bruce. There it is possible for the 
timid child to be happy — for the child destined to an 
early grave to reap his brief harvest in peace. Where- 
fore were there no such asylums in those days ? Man 
flourished then, as now, in beauty and in power. Where- 
fore did he not put forth his power upon establishments 
that might cultivate happiness as well as knowledge ? 
Wherefore did no man cry aloud — 

1 Give to the morn of youth its natural blessedness ? ' 

Well : why or wherefore it will never be made clear, 
but — so it was — these things were not ; or, if they were 
at all, in small local institutions, scarcely heard of beyond 
a few individuals, and comprehending, perhaps, no more 
aliens than that quiet family in which my two brothers 
were living — viz., exactly those two. Meantime, the 
elder of these two, in an evil hour, having quitted that 
most quiet of human sanctuaries, having forfeited that 
peace which possibly he was never to retrieve, fell (as I 



MY BROTHER. 199 

have said) into the power of this Moloch. And this 
Moloch upon him illustrated the laws of his establishment : 
him also, the gentle, the beautiful, but also the proud, the 
arrogant, he beat — beat brutally — kicked, trampled on ! 
In two hours from that time, my brother was on the 
road to Liverpool. Painfully he made out his way to 
Liverpool, having not much money, and with a sense of 
total abandonment which made him feel that all he might 
have would prove little enough for his purposes. Not 
many weeks before this time, we had travelled together, 
we three brothers, over part of this very road, in a post- 
chaise from Chester to the point at which our roads 
diverged. Reaching the inn, we (that is, this brother and 
myself) sat down and wept : we were now to part. We 
wept ; and the youngest, who understood not our grief, 
wept also ; but we understood it well. We had no supe- 
riors who could or would enter into our wishes. Had we 
learned to feel sensibly the shortness of time, we might 
have cared little for this. Five years and a half to me, 
nine and a half to the elder of my two brothers, would 
bring us to the brink of our inheritance ; and then we 
might be happy, according to the mode of our choice. 
But to us these intervals were so long that we should have 
regarded them as sensible expressions of the infinite ; 
and, therefore, we did not think of them at all. We 
wept, because we feared impending changes which might 
justify our tears, and because, at our ages, we were help- 
less against injuries that might be meditated. We parted 
— it was about sunset ; each party entered a post-chaise 
at the same moment — my two brothers into one, I alone 
into the other. There we set off together : waved our 
hands to each other, as our roads diverged from the little 
town of Altrincham ; and never again did either party 
see the other, till ten long years were past. 



200 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

My brother went to an inn, after his long, long journey- 
to Liverpool, foot-sore — (for he had walked through 
many days, and, from ignorance of the world, combined 
with excessive shyness — oh ! how shy do people become 
from pride ! — had not profited by those well-known in- 
cidents upon English high-roads — return post-chaises, 
stage-coaches, led horses, or wagons) — foot-sore and 
eager for sleep. Sleep, supper, breakfast in the morning 
— all these he had ; so far his slender finances reached ; 
and for these he paid the treacherous landlord : who then 
proposed to him that they should take a walk out 
together, by way of looking at the public buildings and 
the docks. It seems the man had noticed mv brother's 
beauty, some circumstances about his dress inconsistent 
with his mode of travelling, and also his style of conver- 
sation. Accordingly, he wiled him along from street to 
street, until they reached the Town Hall. ' Here seems 
to be a fine building,' said this Jesuitical knave, as if it 
had been some recent discovery — a sort of Luxor or 
Palmyra, that he had unexpectedly lit upon amongst the 
undiscovered parts of Liverpool — ' Here seems to be a 
fine building ; shall we go in and ask leave to look at it ? ' 
My brother thinking less of the spectacle than the specta- 
tor, whom, in a wilderness of man, naturally he wished to 
make his friend, consented readily. In they went ; and, 
by the merest accident, Mr. Mayor and the town-council 
were then sitting. The treacherous landlord communi- 
cated privately an account of his suspicions to his Wor- 
ship. He himself conducted my brother, under pretence 
of discovering the best station for picturesque purposes, 
to the particular box for prisoners at the bar. This was 
not suspected by the poor boy, not even when Mr. Mayor 
began to question him. He still thought it an accident, 
though doubtless he blushed excessively on being ques- 



MY BROTHER. 201 

tioned, and questioned so impertinently, in public. The 
object of the Mayor and of other Liverpool gentlemen 
then present [this happened in 1802] was, to ascertain 
my brother's real rank and family : for he persisted in 
representing himself as a poor wandering boy. Various 
means were vainly tried to elicit this information ; until 
at length — like the wily Ulysses, who mixed with his 
pedler's budget of female ornaments and attire, a few 
arms, by way of tempting Achilles to a self-detection in 
the court of Lycomedes — one gentleman counselled the 
Mayor to send for a Greek Testament. This was done ; 
the Testament was presented open at St. John's Gospel to 
my brother, and he was requested to say whether he knew 
in what language that book was written ; or whether per- 
haps he could furnish them with a translation from the 
page before him. Human vanity in this situation was 
hardly proof against such an appeal. The poor boy fell 
into the snare : he construed a few verses ; and immedi- 
ately he was consigned to the care of a gentleman who 
won from him by kindness what he had refused to impor- 
tunities or menaces. His family he confessed at once, but 
not his school. An express was therefore forwarded from 
Liverpool to our nearest male relation — a military man, 
then by accident on leave of absence from a remote 
colony. He came over, took my brother back, (looking 
upon the whole as a boyish frolic of no permanent impor- 
tance,) made some stipulations in his behalf for indemnity 
from punishment, and immediately returned home. Left 
to himself, the grim tyrant of the school easily evaded the 
stipulations, and repeated his brutalities more fiercely than 
before — now acting in the double spirit of tyranny and 
revenge. 

In a few hours my brother was again on the road to Liv- 
erpool. But not on this occasion did he resort to any inn, 
14 



202 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

I 

or visit any treacherous hunter of the picturesque. He of- 
fered himself to no temptations now, nor to any risks. He 
went right onwards to the docks, addressed himself to a 
grave elder master of a trading vessel, bound upon a dis- 
tant voyage, and instantly procured an engagement. The 
skipper was a good and sensible man, and (as it turned 
out) a sailor accomplished in all parts of his profession. 
The ship which he commanded was a South Sea whaler 
belonging to Lord Grenville, whether lying at Liverpool or 
in the Thames at that moment, I am not sure. However, 
they soon afterwards sailed. 

For somewhat more than two years, my brother con- 
tinued under the care of this good man, who was won by 
his appearance, and by some resemblance which he fan- 
cied in his features to a son whom he had lost. Fortu- 
nate, indeed, for the poor boy, was this interval of fatherly 
superintendence ; for, under him, he was not only pre- 
served from the perils which afterwards besieged him, 
until his years had made him more capable of confronting 
them ; but also he had thus an opportunity, which he im- 
proved to the utmost, of making himself acquainted with 
the two separate branches of his profession — navigation 
and seamanship, qualifications which are not very often 
united. 

After the death of this captain, my brother ran through 
many wild adventures ; until at length, after a severe 
action fought off the coast of Peru, the armed merchant- 
man in which he then served was captured by pirates. 
Most of the crew were massacred. My brother, on 
account of the important services he could render, was 
spared ; and with these pirates, cruising under a black 
flag, and perpetrating unnumbered atrocities, he was 
obliged to sail for the next two years and a half; nor 



MY BROTHER. 203 

could he in all that period find any opportunity for effect- 
ing his escape. 

During this long expatriation, let any thoughtful reader 
imagine the perils of every sort which besieged one so 
young, so inexperienced, so sensitive, and so haughty ; 
perils to his life, (but these it was the very expression of 
his unhappy situation, were those least to be mourned 
for ;) perils to his good name, going the length of abso- 
lute infamy — since, if the piratical ship had been cap- 
tured by a British man-of-war, he might have found it 
impossible to clear himself of a voluntary participation in 
the bloody actions of his shipmates; and, on the other 
hand, (a case equally probable in the regions which they 
frequented,) supposing him to have been captured by a 
Spanish guar da costa, he would scarcely have been able, 
from his ignorance of the Spanish language, to draw even 
a momentary attention to the special circumstances of his 
own situation ; he would have been involved in the gen- 
eral presumptions of the case, and would have been 
executed in a summary way, upon the prima facie evi- 
dence against him, that he did not appear to be in the 
condition of a prisoner ; and, if his name had ever again 
reached his country, it would have been in some sad list 
of ruffians, murderers, traitors to their country ; and even 
these titles, as if not enough in themselves, aggravated by 
the name of pirate, which at once includes them all, and 
surpasses them all. These were perils sufficiently dis- 
tressing at any rate ; but last of all, came others even more 
appalling — the perils of moral contamination, in that 
excess which might be looked for from such associates: 
not, be it recollected, a few wild notions or lawless prin- 
ciples adopted into his creed of practical ethics, but that 
brutal transfiguration of the entire character, which 
occurs, for instance, in the case of the young gipsy son of 



204 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

Effie Deans ; a change, making it impossible to rely upon 
the very holiest instincts of the moral nature, and consign- 
ing its victim to hopeless reprobation. Murder itself 
might have lost its horrors to one who must have been but 
too familiar with the spectacle, if not forced into the per- 
petration w r ith his own youthful hands, of massacre by 
wholesale upon unresisting crews, upon passengers en- 
feebled by sickness, or upon sequestered villagers, roused 
from their slumbers by the glare of conflagration reflected 
from gleaming cutlasses, and from the faces of demons. 
This fear it w T as — a fear like this, as, I have often thought 
— which must, amidst her other woes, have been the 
Aaron woe that swallowed up all the rest to the unhappy 
Marie Antoinette. This must have been the sting of 
death to her maternal heart, the grief paramount, the 
'crowning' grief — the prospect, namely, that her royal 
boy would not be dismissed from the horrors of royalty, 
to peace and humble innocence ; but that his fair cheek 
w r ould be ravished by vice as well as sorrow ; that he 
would be tempted into cursing, drinking, and every mode 
of moral pollution ; until, like poor Constance with her 
young Arthur, but for a sadder reason, even if it were 
possible that the royal mother should see her son in ' the 
courts of heaven,' she would not know again one so fear- 
fully transfigured. This prospect for the royal Constance 
of revolutionary France, was but too. painfully fulfilled ; 
as we are taught to guess, even from the faithful records 
of the Duchesse D'Angouleme. The young Dauphin, to 
the everlasting infamy of his keepers, was so trained as 
to become loathsome for coarse and vulgar brutality, as 
well as for habits of uncleanliness, to all who approached 
him — one purpose of his guilty tutors being to render 
royalty and august descent contemptible in his person. 
And, in fact, they were so far likely to succeed in this 



MY BROTHER. 205 

purpose, for the moment, and to the extent of an indi- 
vidual case, that, upon that account alone, but still more 
for the sake of the poor child, the most welcome news 
with respect to him — him whose birth * had drawn 
anthems of exultation from twenty-five millions of men — 
was the news of his death. And what else can well be 
expected for children suddenly withdrawn from parental 
tenderness, and thrown upon their own guardianship at 
such an age as from ten to fourteen, an age combining 
the separate perils of childhood and raw manhood. But, 
in my brother's case, all the adverse chances, overwhelm- 
ing as they seemed, were turned aside by some good 
angel ; all had failed to harm him ; and he came out 
unsinged from the fiery furnace. 

I have said that he would not have appeared to any 
capturing ship as standing in the situation of prisoner 
amongst the pirates,, nor was he such in the sense of being 
confined. He moved about, when on board ship, in free- 



* To those who are open to the impression of omens, there is a most 
striking one on record with respect to the birth of this ill-fated Prince, 
not less so than the falling off of the head from the cane of Charles J. 
at his trial, or the same King's striking a medal, hearing the image of 
an oak tree, with this prophetic inscription, ' Seris nepotibus umbram. 1 
At the very moment when, (according to immemorial usage) the birth, 
of a child was in the act of annunciation to the great officers of State 
assembled in the Queen's bed-chamber, and when a private signal from 
a lady had made known the glad tidings that it was a Dauphin, (the 
first child having been a princess, to the signal disappointment of the 
nation) the whole frame of carved wood-work at the back of the Queen's 
bed, representing the crown and other regalia of France, with the Bour- 
bon lilies, came rattling down in ruins. There is another and more 
direct ill-omen, connected, perhaps, with the birth of this prince; in 
fact, a distinct prophecy of his ruin — a prophecy that he should survive 
his father, and yet not reign — which seems so overladen with mystery, 
that one is perplexed in what light to view it ; and the more so that the 
King (Louis XVIII.) who records it, obviously confounds the first 
Dauphin with the second. 



206 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

dom ; but he was watched, never trusted on shore, unless 
under very peculiar circumstances ; and tolerated at all 
only because one accomplishment made him indispensa- 
ble to the prosperity of the ship. Amongst the various 
parts of nautical skill communicated to my brother by his 
first fatherly captain, was the management of chronome- 
ters. Several had been captured, some of the highest 
value, in the many prizes, European or American. My 
brother happened to be perfect in the skill of managing 
them ; and, fortunately for him, no other person amongst 
them had that skill even in its lowest degree. To this one 
qualification, therefore, (and ultimately to this only,) he 
was indebted for both safety and freedom ; since, though 
he might have been spared, in the first moments of car- 
nage, from other considerations, there is little doubt that, 
in some one of the innumerable brawls which followed 
through the years of his captivity, he would have fallen a 
sacrifice to hasty impulses of anger or wantonness, had 
not his safety been made an object of interest and vigi- 
lance to those in command, and to all who assumed any 
care for the general welfare. Much, therefore, it was that 
he owed to this accomplishment. Still, there is no good 
thing without its alloy ; and this great blessing brought 
along with it something worse than a dull duty — the 
necessity, in fact, of facing fears and trials to which the 
sailor's heart is pre-eminently sensible. All sailors, it is 
notorious, are superstitious ; partly, I suppose, from look- 
ing out so much upon the wilderness of waves, empty of 
all human life ; for mighty solitudes are generally fear- 
haunted and fear-peopled ; such, for instance, as the soli- 
tudes of forests, where, in the absence of human forms 
and ordinary human sounds, are discerned forms more 
dusky and vague, not referred by the eye to any known 
type, and sounds imperfectly intelligible. And, therefore, 



MY BROTHER. 207 

are all German coal-burners, wood-cutters, &c, super- 
stitious. Now the sea is often peopled, amidst its ravings, 
with what seem innumerable human voices — such voices, 
or as ominous, as what were heard by Kubla Khan — 
1 ancestral voices prophesying war ; ' oftentimes laughter 
mixes, from a distance, (seeming to come also from dis- 
tant times, as well as distant places,) with the uproar of 
waters ; and doubtless shapes of fear, or shapes of beauty 
not less awful, are at times seen upon the waves by the 
diseased eye of the sailor, in other cases besides the some- 
what rare one of calenture. This vast solitude of the sea 
being taken, therefore, as one condition of the super- 
stitious fear found so commonly among sailors, a second 
may be the perilous insecurity of their own lives — or, (if 
the lives of sailors, after all, by means of large immunities 
from danger in other shapes, are not so insecure as is sup- 
posed, though, by the way, it is enough for this result that, 
to themselves, they seem so,) yet at all events the inse- 
curity of the ships in which they sail. In such a case, in 
the case of battle, and in others where the empire of 
chance seems absolute, there the temptation is greatest to 
dally with supernatural oracles and supernatural means of 
consulting them. Finally, the interruption habitually of 
all ordinary avenues to information about the fate of their 
dearest relatives ; the consequent agitation which must 
often possess those who are re-entering upon home waters ; 
and the sudden burst, upon stepping ashore, of heart- 
shaking news in long accumulated arrears — these are cir- 
cumstances which dispose the mind to look out for relief 
towards signs and omens as one way of breaking the 
shock by dim anticipations. Rats leaving a vessel des- 
tined to sink, although the political application of it as a 
name of reproach is purely modern, must be ranked 
among the oldest of omens ; and perhaps the most sober- 



208 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

minded of men might have leave to be moved with any 
augury of an ancient traditional order, such as had won 
faith for centuries, applied to a fate so interesting as that 
of the ship to which he was on the point of committing 
himself. Other causes might be assigned, causative of 
nautical superstition, and tending to feed it. But enough. 
It is well known that the whole family of sailors is super- 
stitious. My brother, poor Pink, (this was an old house- 
hold name, which he retained amongst us from an incident 
of his childhood,) was so in an immoderate degree. Being 
a great reader, (in fact, he had read everything in his 
mother tongue that was of general interest,) he was pretty 
well aware how general was the ridicule attached in our 
times to the subject of ghosts. But this — nor the rever- 
ence he yielded otherwise to some of those writers who 
had joined in that ridicule — any more had unsettled his 
faith in their existence, than the submission of a sailor in 
a religious sense to his spiritual counsellor upon the false 
and fraudulent pleasures of luxury, can ever disturb his 
remembrance of the virtues lodged in rum or tobacco. 
His own unconquerable, unanswerable experience, the 
blank realities of pleasure and pain, put to flight all argu- 
ments whatsoever that anchored only in his understanding. 
Pink used, in arguing the case with me, to admit that 
ghosts might be questionable realities in our hemisphere ; 
but c it's a different thing to the suthard* of the line.' And 
then he would go on to tell me of his own fearful experi- 
ence ; in particular of one many times renewed, and 
investigated to no purpose by parties of men communi- 
cating from a distance upon a system of concerted signals, 
in one of the Gallapagos Islands. These islands, which 
were visited, and I think described, by Dampier — and 
therefore must have been a haunt of the Buccaneers and 
Flibustiers in the latter part of the seventeenth century — 



MY BROTHER. 209 

were so still of their more desperate successors, the 
Pirates, at the beginning of the lttth ; and for the same 
reason — the facilities they offer (rare in those seas) for 
procuring wood and water. Hither, then, the black flag 
often resorted ; and here, amidst these romantic solitudes — 
islands untenanted by man — oftentimes it lay furled up 
for weeks together ; rapine and murder had rest for a 
season ; and the bloody cutlass slept within its scabbard. 
When this happened, and when it became known before- 
hand that it would happen, a tent was pitched on shore for 
my brother, and the chronometers were transported thither 
for the period of their stay. 

The island selected for this purpose, amongst the many 
equally open to their choice, might, according to circum- 
stances, be that which offered the best anchorage, or 
that from which the re-embarkation was easiest, or that 
which allowed the readiest access to wood and water. 
But for some, or all of these advantages, the particular 
island most generally honored by the piratical custom and 
' good-will,' was one, known to American navigators as 
1 The Wood-cutter's Island.' There was some old tra- 
dition — and I know not but it was a tradition dating 
from the times of Dampier — that a Spaniard or an In- 
dian settler in this island, (relying, perhaps, too entirely 
upon the protection of perfect solitude,) had been mur- 
dered in pure wantonness by some of the lawless rovers 
who frequented this solitary archipelago. Whether it 
were from some peculiar atrocity of bad faith in the 
act, or from the sanctity of the man, or the deep solitude 
of the island, or with a view to the peculiar edification 
of mariners in these semi-Christian seas — so however it 
was, and attested by generations of sea- vagabonds, (for 
most of the armed roamers in these ocean Zaaras at one 
time were of a suspicious order,) that every night, duly 



210 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

as the sun went down, and the twilight began to prevail, 
a sound arose — audible to other islands, and to every 
ship lying quietly at anchor in that neighborhood — of a 
wood-cutter's axe. Sturdy were the blows, and steady 
the succession in which they followed : some even fan- 
cied they could hear that sort of groaning respiration 
which is made by men who use an axe, or by those who 
in towns ply the 'three-man beetle' of Falstaff, as pa- 
viors ; echoes they certainly heard of every sound, from 
the profound woods and the sylvan precipices on the 
margin of the shores ; which, however, should rather 
indicate that the sounds were not supernatural, since, if 
a visual object, falling under hyper-physical or cata-phy- 
sical laws, loses its shadow by parity of argument, an 
audible object, in the same circumstances, should lose its 
echo. But this was the story : and amongst sailors there 
is as little variety of versions in telling any true sea-story, 
as there is in a log-book, or in ' The Flying Dutchman : ' 
literatim fidelity is, with a sailor, a point at once of re- 
ligious faith and worldly honor. The close of the story 
was — that after, suppose, ten or twelve minutes of hack- 
ing and hewing, a horrid crash was heard, announcing 
that the tree, if tree it were, that never yet was made 
visible to daylight search, had yielded to the old wood- 
man's persecution. It was exactly the crash, so familiar 
to many ears on board the neighboring vessels, which 
expresses the harsh tearing asunder of the fibres, caused 
by the weight of the trunk in falling ; beginning slowly, 
increasing rapidly, and terminating in one rush of rend- 
ing. This over — one tree felled 'towards his winter 
store ' — there was an interval : man must have rest ; 
and the old woodman, after working for more than a 
century, must want repose. Time enough to begin again 
after a quarter of an hour's relaxation. Sure enough, in 



MY BROTHER. 211 

that space of time, again began, in the words of Comus, 
4 the wonted roar amid the woods.' Again the blows 
become quicker, as the catastrophe drew nearer ; again 
the final crash resounded ; and again the mighty echoes 
travelled through the solitary forests, and were taken up 
by all the islands near and far, like Joanna's laugh 
amongst the Westmoreland hills, to the astonishment of 
the silent ocean. Yet, wherefore should the ocean be 
astonished — he that had heard this nightly tumult, by 
all accounts, for more than a century ? My brother, how- 
ever, poor Pink, was astonished, in good earnest, being, 
in that respect, of the genus attonitorum ; and as often 
as the gentlemen pirates steered their course for the Gal- 
lapagos, he would sink in spirit before the trials he might 
be summoned to face. No second person was ever put 
on shore with Pink, lest poor Pink and he might become 
jovial over the liquor, and the chronometers be broken or 
neglected ; for a considerable quantity of spirits was 
necessarily landed, as well as of provisions, because 
sometimes a sudden change of weather, or the sudden 
appearance of a suspicious sail, might draw the ship off 
the island for a fortnight. My brother could have pleaded 
his fears without shame ; but he had a character to main- 
tain with the sailors : he was respected equally for his 
seamanship* and his shipmanship. By the way, when 

* ■ Seamanship and shipmanship.' These are two functions of a 
sailor seldom separated in the mind of a landsman. The conducting 
a ship (causing her to choose a right path) through the ocean — that is 
one thing. Then there is the management of the ship within herself, 
the trimming of her sails, &c, (causing her to keep the line chosen,) 
that is another thing. The first is called seamanship ; the second might 
be called shipmanship: hut is (I believe) called navigation. They are 
perfectly distinct; one man rarely has both in perfection. Both may be 
illustrated from the rudder. The question is, suppose at the Cape of 
Good Hope, to steer for India: trust the rudder to him, as a seaman, 



212 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

it is considered, that one half of a sailor's professional 
science refers him to the stars, (though it is true the other 
half refers him to the sails and shrouds of a ship,) just 
as in geodesical operations, one part is referred to heaven, 
and one to earth — when this is considered, another argu- 
ment arises for the superstition of sailors, so far as it is 
astrological. They who know (but know the on with- 
out knowing the Sta ti) that the stars have much to do in 
guiding their own movements, which are yet so far from 
the stars, and, to all appearance, so little connected with 
them, may be excused for supposing that the stars are 
connected astrologically with human destinies. But this 
by the way. The sailors, looking to Pink's double skill, 
and to his experience on shore, (more astonishing than 
all beside, being experience gathered amongst ghosts,) 
expressed an admiration which, to one who was also a 
sailor, had too genial a sound to be sacrificed, if it could 
be maintained at any price. Therefore it was, that Pink 
still clung, in spite of his terrors, to his shore appointment. 
But hard was his trial ; and many a time has he described 
to me one effect of it, when too long continued, or com- 
bined with darkness too intense. The wood-cutter would 
begin his operations soon after the sun had set ; but, uni- 
formly, at that time, his noise was less. Three hours 
after sunset, it had increased ; and, generally, at mid- 
night it was greatest, but not always. Sometimes the 
case varied thus far : that it greatly increased towards 
three or four o'clock in the morning ; and, as the sound 
grew louder, and thereby seemed to draw nearer, poor 
Pink's ghostly panic grew insupportable ; and he abso- 



who knows the passage whether within or without Madagascar. The 
question is to avoid a sunk rock : trust the rudder to him, as a navigator, 
who understands the art of steering to a nicety. 



MY BROTHER. 213 

lutely crept from his pavilion, and its luxurious comforts, 
to a point of rock — a promontory — about half a mile 
off, from which he could see the ship. The mere sight 
of a human abode, though an abode of ruffians, comforted 
his panic. With the approach of daylight, the mysterious 
sounds ceased. Cock-crow there happened to be none, 
in those islands of the Gallapagos, or none in that par- 
ticular island ; though many cocks are heard crowing in 
the woods of America, and these, perhaps might be caught 
by spiritual senses ; or the wood-cutter may be supposed, 
upon Hamlet's principle, either scenting the morning air, 
or catching the sounds of Christian matin-bells, from some 
dim convent, in the depth of American forests. How- 
ever, so it was; the wood-cutter's axe began to intermit 
about the earliest approach of dawn ; and, as ■ light thick- 
ened'' * it ceased entirely. At nine, ten, or eleven o'clock 
in the forenoon, the whole appeared to have been a delu- 
sion ; but towards sunset, it revived in credit ; during 
twilight it strengthened ; and very soon afterwards, super- 
stitious panic was again seated on her throne. Such were 
the fluctuations of the case. Meantime, Pink, sitting on 
his promontory in early dawn, and consoling his terrors, 
by looking away from the mighty woods to the tranquil 
ship, on board of which (in spite of her secret black flag) 
the whole crew, murderers and all, were sleeping peace- 
fully — he, a beautiful English boy, chased away to the 
Antipodes from one early home by his sense of wounded 
honor, and from his immediate home by superstitious fear, 
recalled to my mind an image and a situation that had 
been beautifully sketched by Miss Bannerman in c Basil,' 
one of the striking (though, to rapid readers, somewhat 
unintelligible) metrical tales published about the beginning 

* 'Lisrht thickens.' — Macbeth. 



214 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

of this century, under the name of Tales of Superstition 
and Chivalry. Basil is a ' rude sea-boy,' desolate and 
neglected from infancy, but with feelings profound from 
nature and fed by solitude. He dwells alone in a rocky 
cave ; but, in consequence of some supernatural terrors 
connected with a murder, arising in some way, (not very 
clearly made out,) to trouble the repose of his home, he 
leaves it in horror, and rushes in the gray dawn to the 
sea-side rocks ; seated on which he draws a sort of con- 
solation for his terrors, or of sympathy with his wounded 
heart, from that mimicry of life which goes on for ever 
amongst the raving waves. 

From the Gallapagos, Pink went often to Juan, (or, as 
he chose to call it, after Dam pier and others, John) Fer- 
nandez. Very lately (December, 1837) the newspapers 
of Europe informed us, and the story was current for 
full nine days, that this fair island had been swallowed 
up by an earthquake ; or, at least, that, in some way or 
other, it had disappeared. Had that story proved true, 
one pleasant bower would have perished — raised by 
Pink as a memorial expression of his youthful feelings 
either towards De Foe, or his visionary creature Robin- 
son Crusoe — but rather, perhaps, towards the substantial 
Alexander Selkirk ; for it was raised on some spot known 
or reputed by tradition to have been one of those most 
occupied as a home by Selkirk. I s.ay l rather towards 
Alexander Selkirk;' for there is a difficnlty to the judg- 
ment in associating Robinson Crusoe with this lovely 
island of the Pacific, and a difficulty even to the fancy. 
Why, it is hard to guessy or through what perverse con- 
tradiction to the facts, De Foe chose to place the ship- 
wreck of Robinson Crusoe upon the eastern side of the 
American continent. Now, not only was this in direct 
opposition to the realities of the case upon which he built, 



MY BROTHER. 215 

as first reported (I believe) by Woodes Rogers, from the 
log-book of the Duke and Duchess — (a privateer fitted 
out, to the best of my remembrance, by the Bristol mer- 
chants, two or three years before the Peace of Utrecht ;) 
and so far the mind of any man acquainted with these 
circumstances was staggered, in attempting to associate 
this eastern wreck with this western island ; but a worse 
obstacle than this, because a moral one, (and what, by 
analogy, to an error against time, which we call an ana- 
chronism, and, if against the spirit of time, a moral 
anachronism, we might here term a moral anatopism,) 
is this — that, by thus perversely transferring the scene 
from the Pacific to the Atlantic, De Foe has transferred it 
from a quiet and sequestered to a populous and troubled 
sea — the Fleet Street or Cheapside of the navigating 
world, the great thoroughfare of nations — and thus has 
prejudiced the moral sense and the fancy against his 
fiction still more inevitably than his judgment, and in a 
way that was perfectly needless ; for the change brought 
along with it no shadow of compensation. 

My brother's wild adventures amongst these desperate 
sea-rovers were afterwards communicated in long letters 
to a female relative ;. and, even as letters, apart from the 
fearful burthen of their contents, I can bear witness that 
they had very extraordinary merit. This, in fact, was 
the happy result of writing from his heart ; feeling pro- 
foundly what he communicated, and anticipating the 
profoundest sympathy with all that he uttered from her 
whom he addressed. A man of business, who opened 
some of these letters, in his character of agent for my 
brother's five guardians, and who had not any special 
interest in the affair, assured me that, throughout the 
whole course of his life, he had never read anything so 
affecting, from the facts they contained, and from the 



216 LIFE .AND MANNERS. 

sentiments which they expressed : above all. the veaming 
for that England which he remembered as the land of his 
youthful pleasures, but also of his youthful degradations. 
Three of the guardians were present at the reading of 
these letters, and were all affected to tears, notwithstand- 
ing they had been irritated to the uttermost by the course 
which both myself and my brother had pursued : a 
course which seemed to argue some defect of judg- 
ment, or of reasonable kindness, in themselves. These 
letters, I hope, are still preserved ; though they have been 
long removed from my control. Thinking of them, and 
their extraordinary merit, I have often been led to believe 
that every post-town, and many times in the course of a 
month, carries out numbers of beautifully written letters, 
and more from woman than from men ; not that men are 
to be supposed less capable of writing good letters : and, 
in fact, amongst all the celebrated letter-writers of past 
or present times, a large overbalance happens to have 
been men ; but that more frequently women write from 
their hearts ; and the very same cause operates to make 
female letters good, which operated at one period to 
make the diction of Roman ladies more pure than that of 
orators or professional cultivators of the Roman language 
— and which, at another period, in the Byzantine Court, 
operated to preserve the purity of the mother idiom 
within the nurseries and the female drawing-rooms of the 
palace, whilst it was corrupted in the forensic standards, 
and the academic — in the standards of the pulpit and the 
throne. 

With respect to Pink's yearning for England, that had 
been partially gratified in some part of his long exile: 
twice, as we learned lung afterwards, he had landed in 
England ; but such was his haughty adherence to his 
purpose, and such his consequent terror of being discov- 



MY BROTHER. 217 

ered and reclaimed by his guardians, that he never 
attempted to communicate with any of his brothers or 
sisters. There he was wrong ; me they should have cut 
to pieces before I would have betrayed him. I, like him, 
had been an obstinate recusant to what I viewed as unjust 
pretensions of authority ; and, having been the first to 
raise* the standard of revolt, had been taxed by my 
guardians with having seduced Pink by my example. 
But that was untrue ; Pink acted for himself. However, 
he could know little of all this ; and he traversed England 
twice, without making an overture towards any commu- 
nication with his friends. Two circumstances of these 
journeys he used to mention ; both were from the port of 
London (for he never contemplated London but as a port) 
to Liverpool ; or, thus far I may be wrong, that one of 
the two might be (in the return order) from Liverpool to 
London. On the first of these journeys his route lay 
through Coventry ; on the other, through Oxford and 

* And here may be a fit place for mentioning a case of equal obstinacy, 
more worthy to be admired than mine, because without a shadow of 
self-interest to support it. When I quitted school in the manner recorded 
in the ' Confessions of an English Opium Eater, ' I left a large trunk 
behind me. This, knowing that I had not time to send it off before me, 
I confided to the care of a boy one class below me ; but, by thoughtful- 
ness and premature dignity of manner, on a level with any class. Im- 
mediately after my elopement was made known, this trunk was reclaimed 
by my guardians. They were men of weight even in that large town. 
The carrier was alarmed ; resisted at first ; but soon afterwards, sus- 
pecting that all the energy and the purse would be on one side, he 
showed symptoms of wavering ; and, doubtless, would have declared 
against my poor claims. But — and to this hour, thirty-six years dis- 
tant, I feel gratitude — at that critical moment, stepped forward this 
boy — this G— b— t, not perhaps much (if anything) above sixteen years 
old. In the face of all the menaces, planted with the carrier, lodged 
there, and registered, this boy held the carrier to his duty — challenged, 
defied him to swerve from it. And the issue was — that the carrier 
knocked under — the boy triumphed — the trunk was sent — I was saved 
from despair. This boy has since been Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. 
15 



1 



218 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

Birmingham. In neither case, had he started with much 
money ; and he was going to have retired from the coach 
as the place of supping on the first night, (the journey 
then occupying two entire days and two entire nights.) 
when the passengers insisted on paying for him : that was 
a tribute to his beauty — not yet extinct. He mentioned 
this part of his adventures somewhat shyly, whilst going 
over them with a sailor's literal accuracy ; though, as a 
record belonging to what he viewed as childish years, he 
had ceased to care about it. On the other journey his 
experience was different, but equally testified to the spirit 
of kindness that is everywhere abroad. He had no 
money, on this occasion, that could purchase even a 
momentary lift by a stage-coach : as a pedestrian, he had 
travelled down to Oxford, occupying two days in the 
fifty-four or fifty-six miles which then measured the road 
from London, and sleeping in a farmer's barn without 
leave asked. Wearied and depressed in spirits, he had 
reached Oxford, hopeless of any aid, and with a deadly 
shame at the thought of asking it. But, somewhere 
in the High Street, and according to his very accurate 
sailor's description of that noble street, it must have been 
about the entrance of All Souls' College, he met a gentle- 
man — a gownsman, who (at the very moment of turning 
into the college gate) looked at Pink earnestly, and then 
gave him a guinea; saying at the time — 'I know what 
it is to be in your situation. You are a schoolboy, 
and von have run away from your school. Well, I was 
once in your situation, and I pity you.' The kind gowns- 
man, who wore a velvet cap with a silk gown, and must 
therefore have been what in Oxford is called a gentleman 
commoner, gave him an address at some college or other, 
Magdalen, he fancied, in after years, where he instructed 
him to call before he quitted Oxford. Had Pink done 



MY BROTHER. 219 

this, and had he frankly communicated his whole story, 
very probably he would have received, not assistance 
merely, but the best advice for guiding his future motions. 
His reason for not keeping the appointment, was simply, 
that he was nervously shy ; and, above all things, jealous 
of being entrapped by insidious kindness into revelations 
that might prove dangerously circumstantial. Oxford had 
a mayor ; Oxford had a corporation ; Oxford had Greek 
Testaments past all counting ; and so, remembering 
past experiences, Pink held it to be the wisest counsel 
that he should pursue his route on foot to Liverpool. 
That guinea, however, he used to say, saved him from 
despair. 

One circumstance affected me in this part of Pink's 
story. I was a student in Oxford at that time. By com- 
paring dates, there was no doubt whatever that I, who 
held my guardians in abhorrence, and above all things 
admired my brother for his conduct, might have rescued 
him at this point of his youthful trials, four years before 
the fortunate catastrophe of his case, from the calamities 
which awaited him. This is felt generally to be the most 
distressing form of human blindness — the case when 
accident brings two fraternal hearts, or any two persons 
whatsoever, deeply interested in effecting a reunion of 
hearts yearning for reunion, into almost touching neigh- 
borhood, and then in a moment after, by the difference, 
perhaps, of three inches in space, or three seconds in 
time, will separate them again, unconscious of their brief 
neighborhood, for many a year, or, it may be, for ever. 
Amongst the monstrocities and the frantic extravagances 
of Goethe, which have excluded, and for ever will exclude 
him from taking root in our literature, there is one drama, 
dull in its conduct and development beyond all precedent, 
but heart-rending in its plot, where this principle of pathos 



220 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

forms the binge of the whole fable — the 'Eugenia 1 I 

mean — a drama in which (and apparently the fable has 
been suggested by some real case amongst the morgan 
or left-handed marriages of Germany) a prince loving 
better than light and day one heavenly girl, a grown-up 
daughter. Eugenia, is suddenly persuaded to believe, fof 
some purpose of intrigue, that she is dead. Well : the 
reader is led to feel that the man is happy, and thrice 
happy, who has no daughter ; because, for him. neither 
fear nor grief of this kind is possible. Meantime, the 
daughter, thus mourned for, and whom the prince would 
have redeemed with his own life a thousand tim 
what becomes of her ? She, with a wretched goveri 
bribed doubly, by money in the first place, and by a 
hollow promise of marriage in the second — is tur. 
adrift : believing herself to have been rejected by her 
father. She travels, unknown for what she is, to a - 
port town : everywhere treated with respect for her per- 
sonal merits : everywhere viewed as a poor wretched 
outcast, under the ban of government ; and not seldom 
standing a chance of being, in that character, thrown 
back upon her fat", 'a doring eyes. All chances, how- 
ever, are thrown away upon her who had been born to 
(fortune. Her father she sees no more : and the drama 
(finished only to the end of the first part) the 

-pect of her embarking for >ome distant land.* How 
this drama would have been terminated, had Goethe ch 
to terminate it, I do not know or gi* ». It ought not to 

■ had a prosperous ending; and yet, for ti. f of 

heart, there should have bt 
when too l a happy reunion. In the present cast-, 

* In this slight abstract of the Eag-cnia. I must warn the reader that 
I speak from a v glance of it, which I took several years* ago, 

and at the time stans pede in uno. 



MY BROTHER. 221 

however, it may be doubted, whether this unconscious 
rencontre and unconscious parting in Oxford ought to be 
viewed as a misfortune. Pink, it is true, endured years 
of suffering, four at least, that might have been saved by 
this seasonable rencontre ; but, on the other hand, by 
travelling through his misfortunes with unabated spirit, 
and to their natural end, he won experience and distinc- 
tions that else he would have missed. His further history 
was briefly this : — 

Somewhere in the river of Plate, he had effected his 
escape from the pirates ; and a long time after, in 1807, I 
believe, (I write without books to consult.) he joined the 
storming party of the English at Monte Video. Here he 
happened fortunately to fall under the eye of Sir Home 
Popham ; and Sir Home forthwith rated my brother as a 
midshipman on board his own ship, which was at that time, 
I think, a fifty gun ship — the Diadem. Thus, by merits 
of the most appropriate kind, and without one particle of 
interest, my brother passed into the royal navy. His 
nautical accomplishments were now of the utmost impor- 
tance to him ; and, as often as he shifted his ship, which 
(to say the truth) was far too often *-=- for his temper was 
fickle and delighting in change — so often these accom- 
plishments were made the basis of very earnest eulogy. I 
have read a vast heap of certificates vouching for Pink's 
qualifications as a sailor, in the highest terms, and from 
several of the most distinguished officers in the service. 
Early in his career as a midshipman, he suffered a morti- 
fying interruption of the active life which had now become 
essential to his comfort. He had contrived to get appoint- 
ed on board a fire-ship, the Prometheus, (chiefly with a 
wish to enlarge his experience by this variety of naval 
warfare,) at the time of the last Copenhagen expedition, 
and he obtained his wish ; for the Prometheus had a very 



222 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

distinguished station assigned her on the great night of 
bombardment; and from her decks, I believe, was made 
almost the first effectual trial of the Congreve rockets. 
Soon after the Danish capital had fallen, and whilst the 
Prometheus was still cruising in the Baltic, Pink, in com- 
pany with the purser of his ship, landed on the coast of 
Jutland, for the purpose of a morning's sporting. It seems 
strange that this should have been allowed upon a hostile 
shore ; and, perhaps, it was not allowed, but might have 
been a thoughtless abuse of some other mission shore- 
wards. So it was, unfortunately ; and one at least of the 
two sailors had leisure to rue the sporting of that day for 
eighteen long months of captivity. They were perfectly 
unacquainted with the localities, but conceived themselves 
able at any time to make good their retreat to the boat, by 
means of fleet heels, and arms sufficient to deal with any 
opposition of the sort they apprehended. Venturing, how- 
ever, too far into the country, they became suddenly aware 
of certain sentinels, posted expressly for the benefit of 
chance English visiters. These men did not pursue, but 
they did worse, for they fired signal shots ; and, by the 
time our two thoughtless Jack tars had reached the shore, 
they saw a detachment of Danish cavalry trotting their 
horses pretty coolly down in a direction for the boat. 
Feeling confident of their power to keep ahead of the 
pursuit, the sailors amused themselves" with various sallies 
of nautical wit ; and Pink, in particular, was just telling 
them to present his dutiful respects to the Crown Prince, 
and assure him that, but for this lubberly interruption, lie 
trusted to have improved his royal dinner by a brace of 
birds — when, oh, sight of blank confusion ! — all at once, 
they became aware that between themselves and their 
boat lay a perfect net-work of streams, deep watery holes, 
requiring both time and local knowledge to unravel. The 



MY BROTHER. 223 

purser hit upon a course which enabled him to regain the 
boat ; but I am not sure whether he also was not captured. 
Poor Pink was at all events: and, through seventeen or 
eighteen months, he bewailed this boyish imprudence. At 
the end of that time there was an exchange of prisoners ; 
and he was again serving on board various and splendid 
frigates. Wyborg in Jutland was the seat of his Danish 
captivity ; and such was the amiableness of the Danish 
character, that, except for the loss of his time, to one who 
was aspiring to distinction and professional honor, none of 
the prisoners who were on parole could have had much rea- 
son for complaint. The street mob, excusably irritated with 
England at that time — (for without entering on the ques- 
tion of right, or of expedience, as regarded that war, it is 
notorious that such arguments as we had for our unan- 
nounced hostilities, could not be pleaded openly by the 
English Cabinet, for fear of compromising our private 
friend and informant, the King of Sweden) — the mob, 
therefore, were rough in their treatment of the British 
prisoners ; at night, they would pelt them with stones ; 
and Jjere and there some honest burgher, who might have 
suffered grievously in his property, or in the person of his 
nearest friends, by the ruin inflicted upon the Danish com- 
mercial shipping, or by the dreadful havoc made in Zea- 
land, would show something of the same bitter spirit. But 
the great body of the richer and more educated inhab- 
itants, showed the most hospitable attention to all who 
justified that sort of notice by their conduct. And their 
remembrance of these English friendships was not fugi- 
tive ; for, through long years after my brother's death, I 
used to receive letters, written in the Danish, (a language 
which I had attained in the course of my studies, and 
which I have since endeavored to turn to account in a pub- 
lic journal for some useful purposes of research, both in 



224 



LIFE AND MANNERS. 



philology and in history.) from young men as well as 
women in Jutland ; letters couched in the most friendly 
terms, and recalling to his remembrance scenes and inci- 
dents which sufficiently proved the terms of intimacy, and 
even of fraternal affection, upon which he had lived 
amongst these public enemies ; and some of them I have 
preserved to this day, as memorials that do honor, on 
different considerations, to both parties alike. 






CHAPTER VIII. 

OXFORD. 

It was in winter, and in the wintry weather of the year 
1803, that I first entered Oxford with a view to its vast 
means of education, or rather with a view to its vast ad- 
vantages for study. A ludicrous story is told of a young 
candidate for clerical orders — that, being asked by the 
Bishop's chaplain if he had ever ' been to Oxford,' as a 
colloquial expression for having had an academic educa- 
tion, he replied, ' No : but he had twice been to Abing- 
don : ' Abingdon being only seven miles distant. In the 
same sense I might say that once before I had been at 
Oxford : but that was as a transient visiter with Lord 
W , when we were both children. Now, on the con- 
trary, I approached these venerable towers in the char- 
acter of a student, and with the purpose of a long 
connection ; personally interested in the constitution of 
the University, and obscurely anticipating that in this 
city, or at least during the period of my nominal attach- 
ment to this academic body, the remoter parts of my 
future life would unfold before me. All hearts were at 
this time occupied with the public interests of the country. 
The ' sorrow of the time ' was ripening to a second har- 
vest. Napoleon had commenced his Vandal, or rather 
Hunnish war with Britain, in the spring of this year, about 
eight months before ; and profound public interest it was, 



226 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

into which the very coldest hearts entered, that a little 
divided with me the else monopolizing awe attached to the 
solemn act of launching myself upon the world. That 
expression may seem too strong as applied to one who had 
already been for many months a houseless wanderer in 
Wales, and a solitary roamer in the streets of London. 
But in those situations, it must be remembered, I was an 
unknown, unacknowledged vagrant ; and without money I 
could hardly run much risk, except of breaking my neck. 
The perils, the pains, the pleasures, or the obligations of 
the world, scarcely exist in a proper sense for him who 
has no funds. Perfect weakness is often secure : it is by 
imperfect power, turned against its master, that men are 
snared and decoyed. Here in Oxford, I should be called 
upon to commence a sort of establishment upon the splen- 
did English scale ; here I should share in many duties and 
responsibilities, and should become henceforth an object of 
notice to a large society. Now first becoming separately 
and individually answerable for my conduct, and no 
longer absorbed into the general unit of a family, 1 felt 
myself, for the first time, burthened with the anxieties of a 
man, and a member of the world. 

Oxford, ancient Mother ! hoary with ancestral honors, 
time-honored, and, haply, it may be, time-shattered power 
— I owe thee nothing ! Of thy vast riches I took not a 
shilling, though living amongst multitudes who owed to 
thee their daily bread. Not the less I owe thee justice ; 
for that is a universal debt. And at this moment, when I 
see thee called to thy audit by unjust and malicious ac- 
cusers — men with the hearts of inquisitors and the 
purposes of Jobbers — I feel towards thee something of 
filial reverence and duty. However, I mean not to speak 
as an advocate, but as a conscientious witness in the 



OXFORD. 227 

simplicity of truth ; feeling neither hope nor fear of a 
personal nature, without fee, and without favor. 

I have been assured from many quarters that the great 
body of the public are quite in the dark about the whole 
manner of living in our English Universities ; and that a 
considerable portion of that public, misled by the totally 
different constitution of Universities in Scotland, Ireland, 
and generally on the continent, as well as by the different 
arrangements of collegiate life in those institutions, are in 
a state worse than ignorant, (that is, more unfavorable to 
the truth) — starting, in fact, from prejudices, and absolute 
errors of fact, which operate most uncharitably upon their 
construction of those insulated statements, which are 
continually put forward by designing men. Hence, I can 
well believe, that it will be an acceptable service, at this 
particular moment, when the very constitution of the two 
English Universities, is under the unfriendly revision of 
Parliament, when some roving commission may be an- 
nually looked for, under a contingency which I will not 
utter in words, (for I reverence the doctrine of ivqa'junrftos,) 
far worse than Cromwellian, i. e. merely personal, and to 
winnow the existing corporation from disaffection to the 
state — a Henry the Eighth commission of sequestration, 
and levelled at the very integrity of the institution — 
under such prospects, I can well believe that a true 
account of Oxford as it ?s, (which will be valid also for 
Cambridge,) mast be welcome both to friend and foe. 
And instead of giving this account didactically, or accord- 
ing to a logical classification of the various items in the 
survey, I will give it historically, or according to the order 
in which the most important facts of the case opened 
themselves before myself, under the accidents of my own 
personal inquiry. No situation could be better adapted 
than my own for eliciting information ; for, whereas most 



228 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

young men come to the University under circumstances of 
absolute determination as to the choice of their particular 
college, and have, therefore, no cause for search or in- 
quiry, I, on the contrary, came thither, in solitary, self- 
dependence, and in the loosest state of indetermination. 
Every single point of my future position and connection, 
to what college I would attach myself, and in which of 
the two orders, open to my admission, I would enrol my- 
self, was left absolutely to my own election. My coming 
at all, in this year, arose out of an accident of conversa- 
tion. In the latter half of 1803, I was living with my 

mother at the priory of St. J , a beautiful place, 

which she had in part planned, and built, but chiefly re- 
paired out of a very ancient Gothic monastery ; when my 
uncle, a military man, on a visit to England, after twenty- 
five years' absence in India, suddenly remarked, that in 
my case he should feel it shameful to be c tied to my 
mother's apron-string,' for was I not eighteen years old ? 
I answered that certainly I was : but what could I do ? 
My guardians had the power to control my expenditure 
until I should be twenty-one ; and they, it was certain, 
would never aid my purpose of going to Oxford, having 
quarrelled with me on that very point. My uncle, a man 
of restless activity, spoke to my mother immediately, I 
presume, for within one hour I was summoned to her 
presence. Among other questions, she put this to me, 
which is importantly connected with my future experience 
at Oxford, and my coming account of it : — c Your guar- 
dians,' she prefaced, 4 still continue to me your school 
allowance of .£100. To this, for the present, when your 
sisters cost me such heavy deductions from my own in- 
come, I cannot undertake to make any addition — that is, 
you are not to count upon any. But, of course, you will 
be free to spend your entire Oxford vacations, and as 



OXFORD. 229 

much time besides as the rules of your college will dis- 
pense with your attendance, at my house, wherever that 
may be. On this understanding, are you willing to un- 
dertake an Oxford life, upon so small an allowance as 
<£100 per annum ? ' My answer was by a cheerful and 
prompt assent. For I felt satisfied, and said as much to 
my mother, that, although this might sound, and might 
really prove, on a common system of expenditure, ludi- 
crously below the demands of the place, yet in Oxford, no 
less than in other cities, it must be possible for a young 
man of firm mind, to live on a hundred pounds annually, 
if he pleased to do so ; and to live respectably. I guessed 
even then how the matter stood ; and so in my own expe- 
rience I found it. If a young man were known to be of 
trivial pursuits, with slight habits of study, and c strong 
book-mindedness,' naturally enough his college peers, 
who should happen to be idlers, would question his right 
to court solitude. They would demand a sight of his 
warrant of exemption from ordinary usages ; and finding 
none, they would see a plain argument of his poverty. 
And, doubtless, when this happens to be the sole char- 
acteristic point about a man, and is balanced by no form 
of personal respectability, it does so far lead to contempt 
as to make a man's situation mortifying and painful ; but 
not more so, I affirm, in Oxford than anywhere else. 
Mere defect of power, as such, and where circumstances 
force it into violent relief, cannot well be other than a 
degrading feature in any man's position. Now, in other 
cities, the man of c£100 a year never can be forced into 
such an invidious insulation — he finds many to keep him 
in countenance ; but in Oxford he is a sort of monster — 
he stands alone in the only class with which he can be 
compared. So that the pressure upon Oxford predispo- 
sitions to contempt is far stronger than elsewhere ; and, 



230 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

consequently, there would be more allowance due, if the 
actual contempt were also stronger — which I deny. But, 
no doubt, in every climate, and under all meridians, it 
must be humiliating to be distinguished by pure defect. 
Now and for ever — to be weak, is in some sense to be 
miserable ; and simple poverty, without other qualification 
or adjunct, is merely defect of power. But, on the other 
hand, in Oxford, at least, as much as in any other place I 
ever knew, talents and severe habits of study are their 
own justification. And upon the strongest possible war- 
rant, viz., my own experience in a college, then recently 
emerging from habits of riotous dissipation, I can affirm 
that a man, who pleads known habits of study as his 
reason for secluding himself, and for declining the ordi- 
nary amusements and wine parties, will meet with neither 
molestation nor contempt. 

For my part, though neither giving nor accepting invi- 
tations for the first two years of my residence, never but 
once had I reason to complain of a sneer, or indeed any 
allusion whatever to habits, which might be understood to 
express poverty. Perhaps, even then, I had no reason to 
complain, for my own conduct in that instance was un- 
wise ; and the allusion, though a personality, and so far 
ill-bred, might be meant in real kindness. The case was 
this — I neglected my dress in one point habitually ; that 
is, I wore clothes until they were threadbare : partly in the 
belief that my gown would conceal their main defects, but 
much more from carelessness and indisposition to spend 
upon a tailor, what I had destined for a bookseller. At 
length, an official person, of some weight in the college, 
sent me a message on the subject through a friend. It 
was couched in these terms — That, let a man possess 
what talents or accomplishments he might, it was not pos- 
sible for him to maintain his proper station, in the public 



OXFORD. 231 

respect, amongst so many servants and people, servile to 
external impressions, without some regard to the elegance 
of his dress. 

A reproof, so courteously prefaced, I could not take 
offence at ; and at that time I resolved to spend some cost 
upon decorating my person. But always it happened that 
some book, or set of books — that passion being absolutely 
endless, and inexorable as the grave — stepped between 
me and my intentions ; until one day, upon arranging my 
toilet hastily before dinner, I suddenly made the discovery 
that I had no waistcoat, [or vest, as it is now called 
through conceit or provincialism,] which was not torn or 
otherwise dilapidated ; whereupon, buttoning up my coat 
to the throat, and drawing my gown as close about me as 
possible, I went into the public ' hall,' [so is called in 
Oxford the public eating-room,] with no misgiving. How- 
ever, I was detected ; for a grave man, with a superla- 
tively grave countenance, who happened on that day to 
sit next me, but whom I did not personally know, address- 
ing his friend sitting opposite, begged to know if he had 
seen the last Gazette, because he understood that it con- 
tained an order in council laying an interdict upon the 
future use of waistcoats. His friend replied with the 
same perfect gravity, that it was a great satisfactiou to his 
mind that his Majesty's government should have issued so 
sensible an order ; which he trusted would be soon fol- 
lowed up by an interdict on breeches, they being still 
more disagreeable to pay for. This said, without the 
movement on either side of a single muscle, the two gen- 
tlemen passed to other subjects ; and I inferred, upon the 
whole, that having detected my manoeuvre, they wished 
to put me on my guard in the only way open to them. At 
any rate, this was the sole personality, or equivocal allu- 
sion of any sort which ever met my ear during the years 



232 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

that I asserted my right to be as poor as I chose. And, 
certainly, my censors were right, whatever were the tem- 
per in which they spoke, kind or unkind ; for a little extra 
care in the use of clothes will always, under almost any 
extremity of poverty, pay for so much extra cost as is 
essential to neatness and decorum, if not even to ele- 
gance. They were right, and I was wrong, in a point 
which cannot be neglected with impunity. 

But to enter upon my own history, and my sketch of 
Oxford life. — Late on a winter's night, in the latter half 
of December, 1803, when a snow storm, and a heavy 
one, was already gathering in the air, a lazy Birmingham 
coach, moving at four and a half miles an hour, brought 
me through the long northern suburb of Oxford, to a 
shabby coach-inn, situated in the Corn Market. Business 
was out of the question at that hour. But the next day I 
assembled all the acquaintances I had in the University, 
or had to my own knowledge ; and to them, in council 
assembled, propounded my first question : What college 
would they, in their superior state of information, recom- 
mend to my choice ? This question leads to the first great 
characteristic of Oxford, as distinguished from most other 
universities. Before me at this moment lie several news- 
papers, reporting, at length, the installation in office (as 
Chancellor) of the Duke of Wellington. The original 
Oxford report having occasion to mention the particular 
college from which the official procession moved, had said, 
no doubt, that the gates of University, the halls of Uni- 
versity, &c, were at such a point of time thrown open. 
But most of the provincial editors, not at all comprehend- 
in"" that the reference was to an individual college, known 
by the name of University College, one of twenty-five 
such establishments in Oxford, had regularly corrected it 
into ' gates of the University,' &c. Here is the first 



OXFORD. 233 

misconception of all strangers. And this feature of 
Oxford it is, which has drawn such exclamations of as- 
tonishment from foreigners. Lipsius, for example, pro- 
tested with fervor, on first seeing this vast establishment 
of Oxford, that one college of this University was greater 
in its power and splendor, that it glorified and illustrated 
the honors of literature more conspicuously by the pomps 
with which it invested the ministers and machinery of 
education, than any entire University of the continent. 

What is a university almost everywhere else ? It an- 
nounces little more, as respects the academic buildings, 
than that here is to be found the place of rendezvous — 
the exchange, as it were, or, under a different figure, the 
palcBstra of the various parties connected with the prose- 
cution of liberal studies. This is their ' House of Call,' 
their general place of muster and parade. Here it is 
that the professors and the students converge, with the 
certainty of meeting each other. Here, in short, are the 
lecture rooms in all the faculties. Well : thus far we see 
an arrangement of convenience — that is, of convenience 
for one of the parties, viz. the professors. To them it 
spares the disagreeable circumstances connected with a 
private reception of their students at their own rooms. 
But to the students it is a pure matter of indifference. In 
all this there is certainly no service done to the cause of 
good learning, which merits a State sanction, or the aid 
of national funds. Next, however, comes an academic 
library, sometimes a good one ; and here commences a 
real use in giving a national station to such institutions, 
because their durable and monumental existence, liable to 
no flux or decay from individual caprice, or accidents of 
life, and their authentic station, as expressions of the 
national grandeur, point them out to the bequests of 
patriotic citizens. They fall also under the benefit of 
1G 



234 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

another principle — the conservative feeling of amateur- 
ship. Several great collections have been bequeathed to 
the British Museum, for instance — not chiefly as a na- 
tional institution, and under feelings of nationality, but 
because, being such, it was also permanent ; and thus the 
painful labors of collecting were guaranteed from perish- 
ing. Independently of all this, I, for my part, willingly 
behold the surplus of national funds dedicated to the con- 
secration, as it were, of learning, by raising temples to 
its honor, even where they answer no purpose of direct 
use. Next, after the service of religion, I would have the 
service of learning externally embellished, recommended 
to the affections of men, and hallowed by the votive sculp- 
tures, as I may say, of that affection, gathering in amount 
from age to age. Magnificabo opostoJatum meum is a 
language almost as becoming to the missionaries and min- 
isters of knowledge, as to the ambassadors of religion. 
It is fit that by pompous architectural monuments, that a 
voice may for ever be sounding audibly in human ears, of 
homage to these powers, and that even alien feelings may 
be compelled into secret submission to their influence. 
Therefore, amongst the number of those who value such 
things, upon the scale of direct proximate utility, rank 
not me : that arithmetic a officina is in my years abomi- 
nable. But still I affirm, that, in our analysis of an ordi- 
nary university, or ■ college ' as it is .provincial!}* called, 
we have not yet arrived at any element of service ren- 
dered to knowledge or education, large enough to call for 
very extensive national aid. Honor has thus far been 
rendered to the good cause by a public attestation — and 
that is well : but no direct promotion has been given to 
that cause, no impulse communicated to its progress, such 
that it can be held out as a result commensurate to the 
name and pretensions of a University. As yet there is 



OXFORD. 235 

nothing accomplished which is beyond the strength of any 
little commercial town. And as to the library in particu- 
lar, besides that in all essential departments it might be 
bought, to order, by one day's common subscription of 
Liverpool or Glasgow merchants, students very rarely 
indeed have admission to its free use. 

What other functions remain to a university ? For 
those which I have mentioned of furnishing a point of 
rendezvous to the great body of professors and students, 
and a point of concentration to the different establishments 
of implements and machinery for elaborate researches, 
[as, for instance, of books and MSS. in the first place ; 
secondly, of maps, charts, and globes ; and thirdly, per- 
haps of the costly apparatus required for such studies as 
Sideral astronomy, galvanic chemistry or physiology, &c. ;] 
all these are uses which cannot be regarded in a higher 
light than as conveniences merely incidental and collateral 
to the main views of the founders. There are, then, two 
much loftier and more commanding ends met by the idea 
and constitution of such institutions, and which first rise to 
a rank of dignity sufficient to occupy the views of a legis- 
lator, or to warrant a national interest. These ends are 
involved — 1st, in the practice of conferring degrees, that 
is, formal attestations and guarantees of competence to 
give advice, instruction, or aid in the three great branches 
of liberal knowledge applicable to human life ; 2d, in 
that appropriation of fixed funds to fixed professorships, by 
means of which the uninterrupted succession of public and 
authorized teachers is sustained in all the higher branches 
of knowledge, from generation to generation, and from 
century to century. By the latter result it is secured, that 
the great well-heads of liberal knowledge and of severe 
science shall never grow dry. By the former it is secured, 
that this unfailing fountain shall be continually applied to 



236 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

the production and to the tasting of fresh labors in endless 
succession for the public service, and thus, in effect, that 
the great national fountain shall not be a stagnant reser- 
voir, but by an endless derivation, (to speak in a Roman 
metaphor !) applied to a system of national irrigation. 
These are the two great functions and qualifications of a 
collegiate incorporation : one providing to each separate 
generation its own separate rights of heirship to all the 
knowledge accumulated by its predecessors, and convert- 
ing a mere casual life-annuity into an estate of inheritance 

— a mere fleeting ayvninua into a tm^a is on i - 7 the other 
securing for this eternal dowry as wide a distribution as 
possible ; the one function regarding the dimension of 
length in the endless series of ages through which it prop- 
agates its gifts ; the other regarding the dimension of 
breadth in the large application throughout any one gene- 
ration of these gifts to the public service. Here are grand 
functions — high purposes ; but neither one nor the other 
demands any edifices of stone and marble ; neither one 
nor the other presupposes any edifice at all built with 
human hands. A collegiate incorporation, the church mil- 
itant of knowledge, in its everlasting struggle with dark- 
ness and error, is, in this respect, like the church of Christ 

— that is, it is always and essentially invisible to the 
fleshly eye. The pillars of this church are human cham- 
pions — its weapons are great truths so shaped as to meet 
the shifting forms of error — its armories are piled and mar- 
shalled in human memories — its cohesion lies in human 
zeal, in discipline, in childlike docility — and all its tri- 
umphs, its pomps, and glories, must for ever depend upon 
talent, upon the energies of the will, and upon the harmo- 
nious co-operation of its several divisions. Thus far, I 
say, there is no call made out for any intervention of the 
architect. 



OXFORD. 237 

Let me apply all this to Oxford. Among the four func- 
tions commonly recognised by the founders of universities, 
which are — 1st, to find a set of halls or places of meet- 
ing ; 2d, to find the implements and accessaries of study ; 
3d, to secure the succession of teachers and learners ; 4th, 
to secure the profitable application of their attainments to 
the public service. Of these four, the two highest need no 
buildings ; and the other two, which are mere collateral 
functions of convenience, need only a small one. Where- 
fore, then, and to what end, are the vast systems of build- 
ing, the palaces and towers of Oxford ? These are either 
altogether superfluous, mere badges of ostentation and 
luxurious wealth, or they point to some fifth function not 
so much as contemplated by other universities, and, at 
present, absolutely and chimerically beyond their means 
of attainment. Formerly we used to hear attacks upon 
the Oxford discipline as fitted to the true intellectual pur- 
poses of a modern education. Those attacks, weak and 
most uninstructed in facts, false as to all that they chal- 
lenged, and puerile as to what implicitly they propounded 
for homage, are silent. But, of late, the battery has been 
pointed against the Oxford discipline in its moral aspects, 
as fitted for the government and restraint of young men, 
or even as at all contemplating any such control. The 
Beverleys would have us suppose, not only that the great 
body of the students are a licentious crew, acknowledging 
no discipline or restraints, but that the grave elders of the 
university, and those who wield the nominal authority of 
the place, passively resign the very shows of power, and 
connive at general excesses, even when they do not abso- 
lutely authorize them in their personal examples. Now, 
when such representations are made, to what standard of 
a just discipline is it that these writers would be understood 
as appealing ? Is it to some ideal, or to some existing and 



238 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

known reality ? Would they have England suppose that 
they are here comparing the actual Oxford with some pos- 
sible hypothetic or imaginable Oxford — with some ideal 
case, that is to say, about which great discussions would 
arise as to its feasibility ; or that they are comparing it 
with some known standard of discipline actually realized 
and sustained for generations, in Leipsic, suppose, or Ed- 
inburgh, or Leyden, or Salamanca ? This is the question 
of questions, to which we may demand an answer ; and, 
according to that answer, observe the dilemma into which 
these furciferous knaves must drop. If they are compar- 
ing Oxford simply with some ideal and better Oxford, in 
some ideal and better world, in that case all they have 
said — waiving its falsehoods of fact — is no more than a 
flourish of rhetoric, and the whole discussion may be 
referred to the shadowy combats of scholastic declama- 
tion-mongers — those mock gladiators, and umbratiles 
doctor es. But if, on the other hand, they pretend to 
take their station upon the known basis of some existing 
institution, — if they will pretend, that in this impeach- 
ment of Oxford, they are proceeding upon a silent com- 
parison with Edinburgh, Glasgow, Jena, Leipsic, Padua, 
&,c. — then are they self-exposed, as men not only with- 
out truth, but without shame. For now comes in, as a 
sudden revelation, and as a sort of deus ex machina, for the 
vindication of the truth, the simple answer to that ques- 
tion proposed above, — Wherefore, and to what end, are 
the vast edifices of Oxford ? A university, as universities 
are in general, needs not, I have shown, to be a visible 
body — a building raised with hands. Wherefore, then, 
is the visible Oxford? To what flfth end, refining upon 
the ordinary ends of such institutions, is the far-stretching 
system of Oxford hospitia, or monastic hotels, directed by 
their founders or applied by their present possessors r 



OXFORD. 239 

Hearken, reader, to the answer: — These vast piles are 
applied to an end, absolutely indispensable to any even 
tolerable system of discipline, and yet absolutely unattain- 
able upon any commensurate scale in any other university 
of Europe. They are applied to the personal settle- 
ment and domestication of the students within the gates 
and walls of that college to whose discipline they are 
amenable. Everywhere else the young men live where 
they please and as they please ; necessarily distributed 
amongst the townspeople ; in any case, therefore, liable to 
no control or supervision whatever ; and in those cases 
where the university forms but a small part of a vast capi- 
tal city, as it does in Paris, Edinburgh, Madrid, Vienna, 
Berlin, and Petersburg, liable to every mode of positive 
temptation, and distraction, which besiege human life in 
high -viced and luxurious communities. Here, therefore, 
it is a mockery to talk of discipline : of a nonentity there 
can be no qualities ; and we need not ask for the descrip- 
tion of the discipline in situations where discipline there 
can be none. One slight anomaly I have heard of as 
varying pro tanto the uniform features of this picture. In 
Glasgow I have heard of an arrangement, by which young 
academicians are placed in the family of a Professor. 
Here, as members of a private household, and that house- 
hold under the presiding eye of a conscientious, paternal, 
and judicious scholar, doubtless they would enjoy as abso- 
lute a shelter from peril and worldly contagion as parents 
could wish : but not more absolute, I affirm, than belongs, 
unavoidably, to the monastic seclusion of an Oxford col- 
lege — the gates of which open to no egress after nine 
o'clock at night, nor after eleven to any ingress which is 
not regularly reported to a proper officer of the establish- 
ment. The two forms of restraint are, as respects the 
effectual amount of control, equal ; and were they equally 



240 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

diffused, Glasgow and Oxford would, in this point, stand 
upon the same level of discipline. But it happens that 
the Glasgow case was a personal accident ; personal, both 
as regarded him who volunteered the exercise of this con- 
trol, and those who volunteered to appropriate its benefits ; 
whereas the Oxford case belongs to the very system, is co- 
extensive with the body of undergraduates, and, from the 
very arrangement of Oxford life, is liable to no decay or 
intermission. 

Here, then, the reader apprehends the first great char- 
acteristic distinction of Oxford — that distinction which 
extorted the rapturous admiration of Lipsius as an expo- 
nent of enormous wealth — but which I now mention as 
applying, with ruinous effect, to the late calumnies upon 
Oxford, as an inseparable exponent of her meritorious dis- 
cipline. She, most truly and severely an 'Alma Mater,' 
gathers all the juvenile part of her flock within her own 
fold, and beneath her own vigilant supervision. In Cam- 
bridge there is, so far, a laxer administration of this rule, 
that, when any college overflows, undergraduates are 
allowed to lodge at large in the town. But in Oxford this 
increase of peril and discretionary power is thrown by 
preference upon the senior graduates, who are seldom 
below the age of twenty-two or twenty-three ; and the 
college accommodations are reserved, in almost their 
whole extent, for the most youthful part of the society. 
This extent is prodigious. Even in my time, upwards of 
two thousand persons were lodged within the colleges ; 
none having fewer than two rooms, very many having 
three, and men of rank, or luxurious habits, having often 
large suites of rooms. But that was a time of war, which 
Oxford experience has shown to have operated most dis- 
proportionably as a drain upon the numbers disposable for 
liberal studies ; and the total capacity of the University 



OXFORD. 241 

was far from being exhausted. There are now, I believe, 
between five and six thousand names upon the Oxford 
books ; and more than four thousand, I understand, of con- 
stant residents. So that Oxford is well able to lodge, and 
on a very sumptuous scale, a small army of men ; which 
expression of her great splendor, I now mention, (as I 
repeat,) purely as applying to the question of her 
machinery for enforcing discipline. This part of her 
machinery, it will be seen, is unique, and absolutely 
peculiar to herself. Other Universities, boasting no such 
enormous wealth, cannot be expected to act upon her sys- 
tem of seclusion. Certainly, I make it no reproach to 
other Universities, that, not possessing the means of 
sequestering their young men from worldly communion, 
they must abide by the evils of a laxer discipline. It is 
their misfortune and not their criminal neglect, which con- 
sents to so dismal a relaxation of academic habits. But 
let them not urge this misfortune in excuse at one time, 
and at another virtually disavow it. Never let them take 
up a stone to throw at Oxford, upon this element of a wise 
education : since in them, through that original vice in 
their constitution — the defect of all means for secluding 
and insulating their society, discipline is abolished by 
anticipation — being in fact an impossible thing : for the 
walls of the college are subservient to no purpose of life, 
but only to a purpose of convenience : they converge the 
students for the hour or two of what is called lecture ; 
which over, each undergraduate again becomes sui juris, 
is again absorbed into the crowds of the world, resorts to 
whatsoever haunts he chooses, and finally closes his day 

at if, in any sense, at home — at a home which 

is not merely removed from the supervision and control, 
but altogether from the bare knowledge of his academic 
superiors. How far this discipline is well administered in 



242 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

other points at Oxford, will appear from the rest of my 
account. But thus far, at least, it must be conceded, that 
Oxford, by and through this one unexampled distinction — 
* her vast disposable fund of accommodations for junior 
members within her own private cloisters — possesses an 
advantage which she could not forfeit, if she would, 
towards an effectual knowledge of each man's daily 
habits, and a control over him, which is all but absolute. 

This knowledge, and this control, is much assisted and 
concentrated by the division of the University into sepa- 
rate colleges. Here comes another feature of the Oxford 
system. Elsewhere the University is a single college ; 
and this college is the University. But in Oxford the Uni- 
versity expresses, as it were, the army, and the colleges 
express the several brigades or regiments. 

To resume, therefore, my own thread of personal nar- 
ration. On the next morning after my arrival in Oxford, 
I assembled a small council of friends to assist me in 
determining at which of the various separate societies I 
should enter, and whether as a ' commoner,' or as a 
' gentleman commoner.' Under the first question was 
couched the following latitude of choice : " I give the 
names of the colleges, and the numerical account of their 
numbers, as it stood in Jan. 1832 ; for this will express, 
as well as the list of that day, (which I do not accurately 
know,) the proportions of importance amongst them. 

Mem. 

1. University College 207 

2. Balliol " 257 

3. Merton M 124 

4. Exeter " 299 

5. Oriel " 293 

6. Queen's " 351 

7. New " 157 

8. Lincoln " 141 



OXFORD. 243 

Mem. 

9. All Souls' College 98 

10. Magdalene " 165 

11. Brazennose u 418 

12. Corpus Christi " . . . . . - .127 

13. Christ Church » 949 

14. Trinity " 259 

15. St. John's " 218 

16. Jesus " 167 

17. Wadham " 217 

18. Pembroke " 189 

19. Worcester " . .... 231 

Then, besides these colleges, five Halls, as they are 
technically called, (the term Hall implying chiefly that 
they are societies not endowed, or not endowed with fel- 
lowships as the colleges are,) viz. — 

Mem. 

1. St. Mary Hall, 83 

2. Magdalen " 178 

3. New Iaa " 10 

4. St. Alban " 41 

5. St. Edmund " 96 

Such being the names, and general proportions on the 
scale of local importance, attached to the different com- 
munities, next comes the very natural question, — What 
are the chief determining motives for guiding the selec- 
tion amongst them ? These I shall state. First of all, a 
man not otherwise interested in the several advantages of 
the colleges has, however, in all probability, some choice 
between a small society and a large one ; and thus far a 
mere ocular inspection of the list will serve to fix his 
preference. For my part, supposing other things equal, I 
greatly preferred the most populous college, as being that 
in which any single member, who might have reasons for 
standing aloof from the general habits of expense, of 
intervisiting, &c, would have the best chance of escaping 



244 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

a jealous notice. However, amongst those ' other things ' 
which I presumed equal, one held a high place in my 
estimation, which a little inquiry showed to be very far 
from equal. All the colleges have chapels, but all have 
not organs ; nor, amongst those which have, is the same 
large use made of the organ. Some preserve the full 
cathedral service ; others do not. Christ Church mean- 
time fulfilled all conditions : for the chapel here happens 
to be the cathedral of the diocese ; the service, therefore, 
is full and ceremonial : the college, also, is far the most 
splendid, both in numbers, rank, wealth, and influence. 
Hither I resolved to go ; and immediately I prepared to 
call on the head. 

The c head,' as he is called generically, of an Oxford 
college, (his specif c appellation varies almost with every 
college — principal, provost, master, rector, warden, &c.) 
is a greater man than the uninitiated suppose. His situa- 
tion is generally felt as conferring a degree of rank not 
much less than episcopal ; and, in fact, the head of Bra- 
zennose at that time, who happened to be the Bishop of 
Bangor, was not held to rank much above his brothers in 
office. Such being the rank of heads generally, « for- 
tiori, that of Christ Church was to be had in reverence ; 
and this I knew. He is always, ex officio, dean of the 
diocese ; and, in his quality of college head, he only, of 
all deans that ever were heard of, is uniformly considered 
a greater man than his own diocesan. But it happened 
that the present dean had even higher titles to considera- 
tion. Dr. Cyril Jackson had been tutor to the Prince of 
Wales (George IV. ;) he had repeatedly refused a bish- 
opric ; and that, perhaps, is entitled to place a man one 
degree above him who has accepted one. He was also 
supposed to have made a bishop, and afterwards, at least, 
it is certain that he made his own brother a bishop. All 



OXFORD. 245 

things weighed, Dr. Cyril Jackson seemed so very great a 
personage, that I now felt the value of my long intercourse 
with great dons in giving me confidence to face a lion of 
this magnitude. 

Those who know Oxford are aware of the peculiar feel- 
ings which have gathered about the name and pretensions 
of Christ Church ; feelings of superiority and leadership 
in the members of that college, and often enough of defi- 
ance and jealousy, on the part of other colleges. Hence 
it happens, that you rarely find yourself in a shop, or 
other place of public resort, with a Christ Church-man, 
but he takes occasion, if young and frivolous, to talk 
loudly of the Dean, as an indirect expression of his own 
connection with this splendid college ; the title of Dean 
being exclusively attached to the headship of Christ 
Church. The Dean, as may be supposed, partakes in 
this superior dignity of his c House ; ' he is officially 
brought into connection w T ith all orders of the British aris- 
tocracy — often with royal personages ; and with the 
younger branches of the aristocracy, his office places him 
in a relation of authority and guardianship — exercised, 
however, through inferior ministry, and seldom by direct 
personal interference. The reader must understand that, 
with rare exceptions, all the princes and nobles of Great 
Britain, who choose to benefit by an academic education, 
resort either to Christ Church College in Oxford, or to 
Trinity College in Cambridge : these are the alternatives. 
Naturally enough, my young friends were somewhat 
startled at my determination to call upon so great a man : 
a letter, they fancied, would be a better mode of applica- 
tion. I, however, who did not adopt the doctrine that no 
man is a hero to his valet, was of opinion, that very few 
men indeed are heroes to themselves. The cloud of 
external pomp, which invests them to the eyes of the 



246 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

attoniti, cannot exist to their own : they do not, like 
Kehama, entering the eight gates of Padalon at once, 
meet and contemplate their own grandeurs; but, more or 
less, are conscious of acting a part. I did not therefore 
feel the tremor which was expected of a novice, on 
being ushered into so solemn a presence. 



CHAPTER IX. 

OXFORD. 

The Dean was sitting in a spacious library or study, 
elegantly, if not luxuriously furnished. Footmen, sta- 
tioned as repeaters, as if at some fashionable rout, gave 
a momentary importance to my unimportant self, by the 
thundering tone of their annunciations. All the machin- 
ery of aristocratic life seemed indeed to intrench this 
great Don's approaches ; and I was really surprised that 
so very great a man should condescend to rise on my 
entrance. But I soon found that, if the Dean's station 
and relation to the higher orders had made him lofty, 
those same relations had given a peculiar suavity to his 
manners. Here, indeed, as on other occasions, I noticed 
the essential misconception as to the demeanor of men of 
rank, which prevails amongst those who have no personal 
access to their presence. In the fabulous pictures of 
novels, (such novels as once abounded,) and in newspaper 
reports of conversations, real or pretended, between the 
King and inferior persons, we often find the writer ex- 
pressing his sense of aristocratic assumption, by making 
the King address people without their titles. The Duke of 
Wellington, for instance, or Lord Liverpool, figures usu- 
ally in such scenes, as 4 Wellington ' or c Arthur,' and as 
1 Liverpool.' Now, as to the private talk of George IV. 
in such cases, I do not pretend to depose ; but, speaking 



248 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

generally, I may say that the practice of the highest 
classes takes the very opposite course. Nowhere is a 
man so sure of his titles or official distinctions as amongst 
them ; for it is upon giving to every man the very extreme 
punctilio of his known or supposed claims, that they rely 
for the due observance of their own. Neglecting no form 
of courtesy suited to the case, they seek, in this way, to 
remind men unceasingly of what they expect ; and the 
result is what I represent — that people in the highest 
stations, and such as bring them continually into contact 
with inferiors, are, of all people, the least addicted to 
insolence or defect of courtesy. Uniform suavity of 
manner is indeed rarely found, except in men of high 
rank. Doubtless this may arise upon a motive of self- 
interest, jealous of giving the least opening or invitation 
to the retorts of ill-temper or low breeding. But, what- 
ever be its origin, such I believe to be the fact. In a very 
long conversation of a general nature upon the course of 
my studies, and the present direction of my reading, 
Dr. Cyril Jackson treated me just as he would have done 
his equal in station and in age. Coming at length to the 
particular purpose of my visit at this time to himself, he 
assumed a little more of his official stateliness. He con- 
descended to say, that it would have given him pleasure 
to reckon me amongst his flock ; ; But, sir,' he said, in a 
tone of some sharpness, l your guardians have acted im- 
properly. It was their duty to have given me at least one 
year's notice of their intention to place you at Christ 
Church. At present I have not a dog-kennel in my col- 
lege untenanted.' Upon this, I observed that nothing 
remained for me to do, but to apologize for having occu- 
pied so much of his time ; that, for myself, I now first 
heard of this preliminary application; and that, as to my 
guardians, I was bound to acquit them of all oversight in 



OXFORD. 249 

this instance, they being no parties to my present scheme. 
The Dean expressed his astonishment at this statement. 
I, on my part, was just then making my parting bows, 
and had reached the door, when a gesture of the Dean's, 
courteously waving me back to the sofa I had quitted, 
invited me to resume my explanations ; and I had a con- 
viction at the moment, that the interview would have 
terminated in the Dean's suspending his standing rule in 
my favor. But, just at that moment, the thundering 
heralds of the Dean's hall announced some man of high 
rank : the sovereign of Christ Church seemed distressed 
for a moment ; but then recollecting himself, he bowed 
in a way to indicate that I was dismissed. And thus it 
happened that I did not become a member of Christ 
Church. 

A few days passed in thoughtless indecision. At the 
end of that time, a trivial difficulty arose to settle my 
determination. I had brought about fifty guineas to Ox- 
ford ; but the expenses of an Oxford inn, with almost 
daily entertainments to young friends, had made such 
inroads upon this sum, that, after allowing for the con- 
tingencies incident to a college initiation, enough would 
not remain to meet the usual demand for what is called 
c caution money.' This is a small sum, properly enough 
demanded of every student, when matriculated, as a 
pledge for meeting any loss from unsettled arrears, such 
as his sudden death or his unannounced departure might 
else continually be inflicting upon his college. By releas- 
ing the college, therefore, from all necessity for degrading 
vigilance or persecution, this demand does, in effect, ope- 
rate beneficially to the feelings of all parties. In most 
colleges it amounts to £25 : in one only it was consider- 
ably less. And this trifling consideration it was, concur- 
ring with a reputation at that time for relaxed discipline, 
17 



250 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

which finally determined me in preferring W College 

to all others. This college had the capital disadvantage, 
in my eyes, that its chapel possessed no organ, and no 
musical service. But any other choice would have driven 
me to an instant call for more money — a measure which, 
as too flagrantly in contradiction to the whole terms on 
which I had volunteered to undertake an Oxford life, I 
could not find nerves to face. 

At W College, therefore, I entered : and here 

arises the proper occasion for stating the true costs of 
an Oxford education. First comes the question of lodg- 
ing. This item varies, as may be supposed ; but my 
own case will place on record the two extremes of cost 
in one particular college, now-a-days differing, I believe, 
from the general standard. The first rooms assigned me 
being small and ill-lighted, as part of an old Gothic build- 
ing, were charged at four guineas a year. These I soon 
exchanged for others a little better, and for them I paid 
six guineas. Finally, by privilege of seniority, I obtained 
a handsome set of well-proportioned rooms, in a modern 
section of the college, charged at ten guineas a year. 
This set was composed of three rooms — viz., an airy 
bedroom, a study, and a spacious rooom for receiving 
visiters. This range of accommodation is pretty general 
in Oxford, and, upon the whole, may be taken perhaps 
as representing the average amount of luxury in this 
respect, and at the average amount of cost. The fur- 
niture and the fittings up of these rooms cost me about 
twenty-five guineas ; for the Oxford rule is, that, if you 
take the rooms, (which is at your own option.) in that 
case, you third the furniture and the embellishments — 
i. e. you succeed to the total cost diminished by one-third. 
You pay, therefore, two guineas out of each three to your 
immediate predecessor. But, as he also may have sue- 



OXFORD. 251 

ceeded to the furniture upon the same terms, whenever 
there happens to have been a rapid succession of occu- 
pants, the original cost to a remote predecessor is some- 
times brought down, by this process of diminution, to a 
mere fraction of the true value ; and yet no individual 
occupant can complain of any heavy loss. Whilst upon 
this subject, I may observe, that, in the seventeenth cen- 
tury, in Milton's time, for example, (about 1624,) and 
for more than sixty years after that era, the practice of 
chumship prevailed : every set of chambers was possessed 
by two co-occupants ; they had generally the same bed- 
room, and a common study; and they were called chums. 
This practice, once all but universal, is now entirely 
extinct ; and the extinction serves to mark the advance 
of the country, not so much in luxury as in refinement. 

The next item which I shall notice, is that which in 
college bills is expressed by the word Tutorage. This 
is the same in all colleges, I believe — viz., ten guineas 
per annum. And this head suggests an explanation which 
is most important to the reputation of Oxford, and fitted 
to clear up a very extensive delusion. Some years ago, 
a most elaborate statement was circulated of the number 
and costly endowment of the Oxford Professorships. 
Some thirty or more there were, it was alleged, and 
five or six only which were not held as absolute sine- 
cures. Now, this is a charge which I am not here mean- 
ing to discuss. Whether defensible or not, I do not now 
inquire. It is the practical interpretation and construction 
of this charge which I here wish to rectify. In most 
universities, except those of England, the Professors are 
the body on whom devolves the whole duty and burthen 
of teaching: they compose the sole fountains of instruc- 
tion ; and if these fountains fail, the fair inference is, 
that the one great purpose of the institution is defeated. 



252 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

But this inference, valid for all other places, is not so for 
Oxford and Cambridge. And here, again, the difference 
arises out of the peculiar distribution of these bodies into 
separate and independent colleges. Each college takes 
upon itself the regular instruction of its separate inmates 
— of these and of no others ; and for this office it appoints, 
after careful selection, trial, and probation, the best quali- 
fied amongst those of its senior members who choose to 
undertake a trust of such heavy responsibility. These 
officers are called tutors ; and they are connected by 
duties and by accountability — not with the university 
at all, but with their own private colleges. The Profes- 
sors, on the other hand, are public functionaries, not 
connected (as respects the exercise of their duties) with 
any college whatsoever — not even with their own — 
but altogether and exclusively with the whole university. 
Besides the public tutors appointed in each college, on 
the scale of one to each dozen or score of students, there 
are also tutors strictly private, who attend any students in 
search of special and extraordinary aid, on terms settled 
privately by themselves. Of these persons, or their ex- 
istence, the college takes no cognizance ; but, between 
the two classes of tutors, the most studious young men — 
those who would be most likely to avail themselves of 
the lectures read by the Professors — have their whole 
time pretty severely occupied : and the inference from 
all this is, not only that the course of Oxford education 
would suffer little if no Professors at all existed, but also 
that, if the existing Professors were ex abundanti to 
volunteer the most exemplary spirit of exertion, however 
much this spectacle of conscientious dealing might edify 
the University, it would contribute but little to the pro- 
motion of academic purposes. The establishment of 
Professors is, in fact, a thing of ornament and pomp. 



OXFORD. 253 

Elsewhere, they are the working servants ; but, in Ox- 
ford, the ministers corresponding to them bear another 
name — they are called Tutors. These are the working 
agents in the Oxford system ; and the Professors, with 
salaries in many cases merely nominal, are persons 
sequestered, and properly sequestered, to the solitary 
cultivation and advancement of knowledge, which a dif- 
ferent order of men is appointed to communicate. 

Here let us pause for one moment, to notice another 
peculiarity in the Oxford system, upon the tendency of 
which I shall confidently make my appeal to the good 
sense of all unprejudiced readers. I have said that the 
Tutors of Oxford correspond to the Professors of other 
universities. But this correspondence, which is absolute 
and unquestionable as regards the point then at issue — 
viz , where we are to look for that limb of the establish- 
ment on which rests the main teaching agency — is liable 
to considerable qualification, when we examine the mode 
of their teaching. In both cases, this is conveyed by 
what is termed ' lecturing ; ' — but what is the meaning 
of a lecture in Oxford and elsewhere ? Elsewhere, it 
means a solemn dissertation, read, or sometimes histri- 
onically declaimed, by the professor. In Oxford, it means 
an exercise performed orally by the students, occasionally 
assisted by the tutor, and subject, in its whole course, to 
his corrections, and what may be called his scholia, or 
collateral suggestions and improvements. Now, differ as 
men may as to other features of the Oxford, compared 
with the hostile system, here I conceive that there is no 
room for doubt or demur. An Oxford lecture imposes a 
real bona fide task upon the student ; it will not suffer 
him to fall asleep, either literally or in the energies of 
his understanding ; it is a real drill, under the excitement, 
perhaps, of personal competition, and under the review 



254 LIFE A^D MANNERS. 

of a superior scholar. But, in Germany, under the decla- 
mations of the Pro :he young men are often literally 
sleeping ; nor is it easy to see how the attention can be 
kept from wandering, on this plan, which subjects the 
auditor to no risk of sudden question or personal appeal. 
As to the prizes given for essays, vN:c. by the Professors, 
these have the effect of drawing forth latent talent, but 
they can yield no criterion of the attention paid to the 
Professor ; not to say that the competition for these pi 
is a matter of choice. Sometimes, it is true that exami- 
nations take place ; but the Oxford lecture is a daily 
examination: and, waving that, what chance is there (I 
would ask) for searching examinations, for examinations 
conducted with the requisite auctoritas. (or weight of 
influence, derived from personal qualities,) if — which 
may Heaven prevent! — the German tenure of profes- 
sorships were substituted for our British one : that is, if 
for independent and liberal teachers were substituted poor 
mercenary haberdashers of knowledge — cap in hand to 
opulent students — servile to their caprices — and, at one 
blow, degrading the science they profess, the teacher, 
and the pupil ? Yet I hear that such advice ivas given 
to a Royal Commission, sent to investigate one or more 
of the Scottish universities. In the German universities, 
every Professor holds his situation — not in his good 
behavior — but on the capricious pleasure of the young 
men who resort to his market. Fk ojjens a shop, in fact : 
others, without limit, generally men of no credit or kr. 
respectability, are allowed to open rival shops ; and the 
result is, sometimes, that the whole kennel of scoundrel 
Professors ruin one another ; each standing with his mouth 
open, to leap at any bone thrown amongst them, from the 
table of the ; Burschen ;' all hating, fighting, calumniating 
each other, until the land is sick of its base knowledge- 



OXFORD. 255 

mongers, and would vomit the loathsome crew, were any 
natural channel open to their instincts of abhorrence. 
The most important of the Scottish Professorships- — 
those which are fundamentally morticed to the moral 
institutions of the land — are upon the footing of Oxford 
tutorships, as regards emoluments : that is, they are not 
suffered to keep up a precarious mendicant existence, 
upon the alms of the students, or upon their fickle admi- 
rations. It is made imperative upon a candidate for ad- 
mission into the ministry of the Scottish Kirk, that he 
shall show a certificate of attendance through a given 
number of seasons at given lectures. 

The next item in the quarterly (or, technically, the 
term) bills of Oxford is, for servants. This, in my col- 
lege, and, I believe, in all others, amounted nominally 
to two guineas a year. That sum, however, w 7 as paid 
to a principal servant, whom, perhaps, you seldom or 
never saw ; the actual attendance upon yourself being 
performed by one of his deputies; and to this deputy — 
who is, in effect, a factotum, combining in his single 
person all the functions of chambermaid, valet, waiter 
at meals, and porter or errand-boy — by the custom of 
the place and your own sense of propriety, you cannot 
but give something or other in the shape of perquisites. 
I was told, on entering, that half a guinea a quarter was 
the customary allowance — the same sum, in fact, as was 
levied by the college for his principal ; but I gave mine 
a guinea a quarter, thinking that little enough for the 
many services he performed ; and others, who were richer 
than myself, I dare say, often gave much more. Yet, 
sometimes, it struck me, from the gratitude which his 
looks testified, on my punctual payment of this guinea — 
for it was the only bill with regard to which I troubled 
myself to practise any severe punctuality — that perhaps 



256 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

some thoughtless young man might give him less, or might 
even forget to give anything ; and, at all events, 1 have 
reason to believe that half the sum would have contented 
him. These minutiae I record purposely ; my immediate 
object being to give a rigorous statement of the real ex- 
penses incident to an English University education, partly 
as a guide to the calculations of parents, and partly as an 
answer to the somewhat libellous exaggerations which are 
current on this subject, in times like these, when even the 
truth itself, and received in a spirit of candor the most 
indulgent, may be all too little to defend these venerable 
seats of learning from the ruin which seems brooding over 
them. Yet, no ! Abominable is the language of despair 
even in a desperate situation. And, therefore, Oxford, 
ancient mother! and thou, Cambridge, twin-light of Eng- 
land ! be vigilant and erect, for the enemy stands at all 
your gates ! Two centuries almost have passed, since the 
boar was within your vineyards, laying waste and desolat- 
ing your heritage. Yet that storm was not final, nor that 
eclipse total ! May this also prove but a trial and a 
shadow of affliction ! which affliction, may it prove to you, 
mighty incorporations, what, sometimes, it is to us poor 
frail homunculi — a process of purification, a solemn and 
oracular warning ! And, when that cloud is overpast, 
then, rise, ancient powers, wiser and better — ready, like 
the lafin<g&r t <pQQoi of old, to enter upon, a second stadium, 
and to transmit the sacred torch through a second period 
of twice * five hundred years. So prays a loyal alumnus, 
whose presumption, if any be, in taking upon himself a 
monitory tone, is privileged by zeal and filial anxiety* 



* Oxford may confessedly claim a duration of that extent ; and the 
pretensions of Cambridge, in that respect, if less aspiring, are, however, 
as I believe, less accurately determined. 



OXFORD. 257 

To return, however into the track from which I have 
digressed. The reader will understand that any student 
is at liberty to have private servants of his own, as many 
and of what denomination he pleases. This point, as 
many others of a merely personal bearing, when they 
happen to stand in no relation to public discipline, neither 
the university nor the particular college of the student 
feels summoned or even authorized to deal with, Neither, 
in fact, does any other university in Europe ; and why, 
then, notice the case ? Simply thus : if the Oxford dis- 
cipline, in this particular chapter, has nothing special or 
peculiar about it, yet the case to which it applies has, and 
is almost exclusively found in our universities. On the 
Continent, it happens most rarely that a student has any 
funds disposable for luxuries so eminently such as grooms 
or footmen ; but, at Oxford and Cambridge, the case 
occurs often enough to attract notice from the least vigi- 
lant eye. And thus we find set down to the credit account 
of other universities, the non-existence of luxury in this 
or other modes, whilst, meantime, it is well known to the 
fair inquirer, that each or all are indulgences, not at all 
or so much as in idea proscribed by the sumptuary edicts 
of those universities ; but, simply, by the lower scale of 
their general revenues. And this lower scale, it will be 
said — how do you account for that ? I answer, not so 
much by the general inferiority of Continental Europe to 
Great Britain in diffusive wealth ; (though that argument 
goes for something, it being notorious, that, whilst immod- 
erate wealth, concentrated in a small number of hands, 
exists in various continental states upon a larger scale 
than with us, moderately large estates, on the other hand, 
are, with them, as one to two hundred or even two hun- 
dred and fifty, in comparison of ours ;) but chiefly upon 
this fact, which is too much overlooked, that the foreign 



258 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

universities are not peopled from the wealthiest classes, 
which are the class either already noble, or wishing to 
become such. And why is that ? Purely from the vicious 
constitution of society on the Continent, where all the 
fountains of honor lie in the military profession or in the 
diplomatic. We English — haters and revilers of our- 
selves beyond all precedent, disparagers of our own 
eminent advantages beyond all sufferance of honor or 
good sense, and daily playing into the hands of foreign 
enemies, who hate us out of mere envy or shame — have 
amongst us some hundreds of writers who will die or 
suffer martyrdom upon this proposition — that aristocracy, 
and the spirit and prejudices of aristocracy, are more 
operative (more effectually and more extensively opera- 
tive) amongst ourselves than in any other known society 
of men. Now I, who believe all errors to arise in some 
narrow, partial, or angular view of truth, am seldom 
disposed to meet any sincere affirmation by a blank un- 
modified denial. Knowing, therefore, that some acute 
observers do reallv believe this doctrine as to the aristo- 
cratic forces, and the way in which they mould English 
society, I cannot but suppose that some symptoms do 
really exist of such a phenomenon ; and the only remark 
I shall here make on the case is this, that, very often, 
where any force or influence reposes upon deep realities, 
and upon undisturbed foundations, there will be the least 
heard of loquacious and noisy expressions of its power ; 
which expressions arise most, not where the current is 
most violent, but where (being possibly the weakest) it is 
most fretted with resistance. 

In England, the very reason why the aristocratic feel- 
ing makes itself so sensibly felt and and so distinctly an 
object of notice to the censorious observer, is, because it 
maintains a troubled existence amongst counter and ad- 



OXFORD. 259 

verse influences, so many and so potent. This might be 
illustrated abundantly. But, as respects the particular 
question before me, it will be sufficient to say this : with 
us the profession and exercise of knowledge, as a means 
of livelihood, is honorable — on the Continent it is not so. 
The knowledge, for instance, which is embodied in the 
three learned professions, does, with us, lead to distinction 
and civil importance ; no man can pretend to deny this ; 
nor, by consequence, that the professors personally take 
rank with the highest order of gentlemen. Are they not, 
I demand, everywhere with us on the same footing, in 
point of rank and consideration, as those who bear the 
king's commission in the army and navy ? Can this be 
affirmed of the Continent, either generally, or, indeed, 
partially ? I say, no. Let us take Germany, as an illus- 
tration. Many towns (for anything I know, all) present 
us with a regular bisection of the resident notables, or 
wealthier class, into two distinct (often hostile) coteries ; 
one being composed of those who are fc noble,'' the other, 
of families equally well educated and accomplished, but 
not, in the continental sense, c noble.' The meaning and 
value of the word is so entirely misapprehended by the 
best English writers, being, in fact, derived from our 
own way of applying it, that it becomes important to 
ascertain its true value. A 6 nobility,' which is numerous 
enough to fill a separate ball-room in every sixth-rate 
town, it needs no argument to show, cannot be a nobility 
in any English sense. In fact, an edelmann or nobleman, 
in the German sense, is strictly what w T e mean by a born 
gentleman ; with this one only difference, that, whereas, 
with us, the rank which denominates a man such, 
passes off by shades so insensible and almost infinite 
into the ranks below, that it becomes impossible to assign 
it any strict demarcation or lines of separation ; on the 






260 LIFE AND RS. 

contrary, the continental noble points lo certain fixed 

harriers, in the shape of privil< ges, which divide him, 
per snlti/m, from those who arc below Ins own order. But 

were it not for this one legal benefit of accurate circum- 
scription and slight favor, the continental nohle, whether 
Baron of Germany, Count of Prance, or Prince of Sicily 
and of Russia, is simply en a level with the common 
landed esquire of Britain, and not on a level in very 
numerous cases. Sueh being the case, how paramount 
DMisI he the spirit of aristocracy in continental society! 
Our haute noblesse — our genuine nobility, who are such 
in the genera] feeling (^' their compatriots, will do that 
which the phantom of nobility of the Continent will not: 
the spurious nobles of Germany will not mix, on equal 
terms, with their untitled fellow-citizens, living in the 
<ame city and in the same style as themselves : they will 
not meet them in the same hall or concert room. Our 
great territorial nobility, though sometimes forming exclu- 
sive circles, (hut not, however, upon any principle of high 
birth,) do so daily. They mix as equal partakers in the 
Bane amusements of races, halls, musical assemblies, 
with the haronets, (or ilite of the gentry :) with the 
landed esquires, (or middle gentry :) with the superior 
order of tradesmen, (who, in Germany, are absolute 
ciphers, for political weight or social consideration, hut, 
with us, constitute the lower and broader stratum of the 
rwbi/itas* or gentry.) Th ire baronage oC I 

* It may be necessary to inform some readers, that the won! to — 
by which so large a system of imposition ami fraud, as to ihe compo- 
sition of foreign society, lias long been practised upon the cradnlitj of 
the British — cor ras poi ir word /•>/»/, (or, rather, to the 

<r word if thai Word were ever used legally, or c.vtrc 

dum t ) not merely upon the argument of its virtual and operative value 
in the general estimate of men. (». e. upon the argument that a count, 
baron, &c, does not, qua I mm and any deeper feeling of reject 



OXFORD. 261 

many, it is undeniable, insist upon having ' an atmosphere 
of their own;' whilst the Howards, the Stanleys, the 
Talbots of England ; the Hamiltons, the Douglases, the 
Gordons of Scotland, are content to acknowledge a sym- 
pathy with the liberal part of their untitled countrymen, in 
that point which most searchingly tries the principle of 
aristocratic pride — viz. in their pleasures. To have the 
same pursuits of business with another, may be a result 
of accident or position : to have the same pleasures, being 
a matter of choice, argues a community of nature in the 
moral sensibilities, in that part of our constitution which 
differences one man from another in the capacities of 
greatness and elevation. As with their amusements, so 
with their graver employments ; the same mutual repul- 
sion continues to divide the two orders through life. 

The nobles either live in gloomy seclusion upon their 
private funds, wherever the privilege of primogeniture 
has enabled them to do so : or, having no funds at all, 
(the case of ninety-nine in one hundred,) they go into the 
army ; that profession, the profession of arms, being re- 
garded as the only one compatible with an edelmanri's 
pretensions. Such was once the feeling in England ; 
such is still the feeling on the Continent. It is a prejudice 
naturally clinging to a semi-barbarous (because growing 
out of a barbarous) state, and, in its degree, clinging to 
every stage of imperfect civilization ; and, were there 
no other argument, this would be a sufficient one, that 
England, under free institutions, has outrun the Continent 
in real civilization, by a century ; a fact which is con- 
cealed by the forms of luxurious refinement in a few 

or homage than a British esquire.) but also upon the fact, that, origi- 
nally, in all English registers, as, for instance, in the Oxford matricu- 
lation registers, all the upper gentry (knights, esquires, &c.,) are 
technically designated by the word nobllcs. — See Chamberlayne, <$*c. 



262 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

exclusive classes, too often usurping the name and honors 
of radical civilization. 

From this super-appreciation of the military profession, 
arises a corresponding contempt of all other professions 
whatsoever paid by fellow-citizens, and not by the King 
or the State. The clerical profession is in the most abject 
degradation throughout Southern Germany ; and the rea- 
son why this forces itself less imperiously upon the public 
notice, is, that, in rural situations, from the absence of a 
resident gentry, (speaking generally,) the pastor is brought 
into rare collision with those who style themselves noble ; 
whilst, in towns, the clergy find people enough to coun- 
tenance those who, being in the same circumstances as 
to comfort and liberal education, are also under the 
same ban of rejection from the 6 nobility,' or born gentry. 
The legal profession is equally degraded : even a bar- 
rister or advocate holds a place in the public esteem little 
differing from that of an old Bailey attorney of the worst 
class. And this result is the less liable to modification 
from personal qualities ; inasmuch as there is no great 
theatre (as with us) for individual display. Forensic 
eloquence is unknown in Germany, as it is too generally 
on the Continent, from the defect of all popular or open 
judicatures. A similar defect of deliberative assemblies 
— such, at least, as represent any popular influences and 
debate with open doors — intercepts the very possibility of 
senatorial eloquence.* That of the pulpit only remains. 
But even of this — whether it be from want of the excite- 



* The subject is amusingly illustrated by an anecdote of Goethe, 
recorded by himself in his autobiography. Some physiognomist, or 
phrenologist, had found out, in Goethe's structure of head, the sure 
promise of a great orator. 'Strange infatuation of nature!' observes 
Goethe, on this assurance, 'to endow me so richly and liberally for that 
particular destination, which only the institutions of my country render 
impossible. Music for the deaf! Eloquence without an audience ! ' 



OXFORD. 263 

ment and contagious emulation from the other fields of 
oratory, or from the peculiar genius of Lutheranism — no 
models have yet arisen that could, for one moment, sus- 
tain a comparison with those of England or France. The 
highest names in this department would not, to a foreign 
ear, carry with them any of that significance or promise 
which surrounds the names of Jeremy Taylor or Barrow, 
Bossuet or Bourdaloue, to those even who have no per- 
sonal acquaintance with their works. This absence of all 
fields for gathering public distinctions, co-operates, in a 
very powerful way, with the contempt of the born gentry, 
to degrade these professions ; and this double agency is, a 
third time, reinforced by those political arrangements 
which deny every form of State honor or conspicuous 
promotion to the very highest description of excellence, 
whether of the bar, the pulpit, or the civic council. Not 
c the fluent Murray,' or the accomplished Erskine, from 
the English bar — not Pericles or Demosthenes, from the 
fierce democracies of Greece — not Paul preaching at 
Athens — could snatch a wreath from public homage, nor 
a distinction from the State, nor found an influence, nor 
leave behind them an operative model, in Germany, as 
now constituted. Other walks of emolument are still 
more despised. Alfieri, a Continental c noble ' — that is, 
a born gentleman — speaks of bankers as we in England 
should of a Jewish usurer, or tricking money-changer. 
The liberal trades — such as those which minister to lit- 
erature or the fine arts, which, with us, confer the station 
of gentleman upon those who exercise them — are, in the 
estimate of a continental ' noble,' fitted to assign a certain 
rank or place in the train and equipage of a gentleman, 
but not to entitle their most eminent professors to sit down, 
except by sufferance, in his presence. And, upon this 
point, let not the reader derive his notions from the Ger- 



264 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

man books : the vast majority of German authors are not 
' noble ; ' and, of those who are, nine-tenths are liberal in 
this respect, and speak the language of liberality, not by 
sympathy with their own order, or as representing their 
feelings, but in virtue of democratic or revolutionary 
politics. 

Such as the rank is, and the public estimation of the 
leading professions, such is the natural condition of the 
universities which rear them. The c nobles ' going gen- 
erally into the army or leading lives of indolence, the 
majority by far of those who resort to universities do so as 
a means of future livelihood. Few seek an academic life 
in Germany who have either money to throw away on 
superfluities and external show, or who have such a rank 
to support as might stimulate their pride to expenses be- 
yond their means. Parsimony, is, therefore, in these 
places, the governing law ; and pleasure, not less fervently 
wooed than at Oxford or at Cambridge, putting off her 
robes of elegance and ceremony, descends to grossness, 
and not seldom to abject brutality. 

The sum of my argument is — that, because, in com- 
parison of the army, no other civil profession is, in it- 
self, held of sufficient dignity ; and not less, perhaps, 
because, under governments essentially unpopular, none 
of these professions has been so dignified artificially by 
the State, or so attached to any ulterior promotion, either 
through the State or in the State, as to meet the demands 
of aristocratic pride — none of them is cultivated as a 
means of distinction, but originally as a means of liveli- 
hood ; that the universities, as the nurseries of these un- 
honored professions, share naturally in their degradation ; 
and that, from this double depreciation of the place and 
its final objects, few or none resort thither who can be 
supposed to bring any extra funds for supporting a system 



OXFORD. 265 

of luxury ; that the general temperance, or sobriety of 
demeanor, is far enough, however, from keeping pace 
with the absence of costly show ; and that, for this ab- 
sence even, we are to thank their poverty rather than 
their will. It is to the great honor, in my opinion, of our 
own country, that those often resort to her fountains who 
have no motive but that of disinterested reverence for 
knowledge ; seeking, as all men perceive, neither emolu- 
ment directly from university funds, nor knowledge as the 
means of emolument. Doubtless, it is neither dishonor- 
able, nor, on a large scale, possible to be otherwise, that 
students should pursue their academic career chiefly as 
ministerial to their capital object of a future livelihood. 
But still I contend that it is for the interest of science and 
good letters, that a considerable body of volunteers should 
gather about their banners, without pay or hopes of pre- 
ferment. This takes place on a larger scale at Oxford 
and Cambridge, than elsewhere ; and it is but a trivial 
concession in return, on the part of the university, that 
she should allow, even if she had the right to withhold, the 
privilege of living within her walls as they would have 
lived at their fathers' seats ; with one only reserve, applied 
to all modes of expense that are, in themselves, immoral 
excesses, or occasions of scandal, or of a nature to inter- 
fere too much with the natural hours of study, or specially 
fitted to tempt others of narrower means to ruinous emu- 
lation. 

Upon these principles, as it seems to me, the discipline 
of the university is founded. The keeping of hunters, 
for example, is unstatutable. Yet, on the other hand, it is 
felt to be inevitable that young men of high spirit, familiar 
with this amusement, will find means to pursue it in defi- 
ance of all the powers, however exerted, that can properly 
be lodged in the hands of academic officers. The range 
18 



266 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

of the proctor's jurisdiction is limited by positive law ; 
and what should hinder a young man, bent upon his 



up< 

pleasure, from fixing the station of his hunter a few miles 
out of Oxford, and riding to cover on a hack, unamenable 
to any censure r For, surely, in this age, no man could 
propose so absurd a thing as a general interdiction of 
riding. How, in fact, does the university proceed ? She 
discountenances the practice ; and, if forced upon her 
notice, she visits it with censure, and that sort of punish- 
ment which lies within her means. But she takes no 
pains to search out a trespass, which, by the mere act of 
seeking to evade public display in the streets of the uni- 
versity, already tends to limit itself; and which, besides, 
from its costliness, can never become a prominent nui- 
sance. This I mention as illustrating the spirit of her 
legislation ; and, even in this case, the reader must cam- 
along with him the peculiar distinction which I have 
pressed with regard to English universities, in the exist- 
ence of a large volunteer order of students seeking only 
the liberalization and not the profits of academic life. In 
arguing upon their case, it is not the fair logic to say — 
These pursuits taint the decorum of the studious character ; 
it is not fair to calculate how much is lost to the man of 
letters by such addiction to fox-hunting ; but, on the con- 
trary, what is gained to the fox-hunter, who would, at any 
rate, be such, by so considerable a homage paid to letters, 
and so inevitable a commerce with men of learning. 
Anything whatsoever attained in this direction, is probably 
so much more than would have been attained under a 
system of less toleration. Lucro ponamus, we say, of the 
very least success in such a case. But, in speaking of 
toleration as applied to acts or habits positively against the 
statutes, I limit my meaning to those which, in their own 
nature, are morally indifferent, and are discountenanced 



OXFORD. 267 

simply as indirectly injurious, or as peculiarly open to 
excess. Because, on graver offences, (as gambling, &,c.,) 
the malicious impeachers of Oxford must well have 
known, that no toleration whatsoever is practised or 
thought of. Once brought under the eye of the university 
in a clear case and on clear evidence, it would be pun- 
ished in the most exemplary way open to a limited au- 
thority ; by rustication at least — i. e. banishment for a 
certain number of terms, and consequent loss of these 
terms — supposing the utmost palliation of circumstances; 
and, in an aggravated case, or in a second offence, most 
certainly by final expulsion. But it is no part of duty to 
serve the cause even of good morals by impure means ; 
and it is as difficult beforehand to prevent the existence of 
vicious practices so long as men have, and ought to have 
the means of seclusion liable to no violation, as it is after- 
wards difficult, without breach of honor, to obtain proof of 
their existence. Gambling has been known to exist in 
some dissenting institutions ; and, in my opinion, with no 
blame to the presiding authorities. As to Oxford in par- 
ticular, no such habit was generally prevalent in my time ; 
it is not an English vice ; nor did I ever hear of any 
great losses sustained- in this way. But, were it otherwise, 
I must hold, that, considering the numbers, rank, and 
great opulence of the students, such a habit would 
impeach the spirit and temper of the age rather than the 
vigilance or magisterial fidelity of the Oxford authorities, 
They are limited, like other magistrates, by honor and 
circumstances, in a thousand ways ; and if a knot of 
students will choose to meet for purposes of gaming, they 
must always have it in their power to baffle every honor- 
able or becoming attempt at detecting them. But upon 
this subject I shall make two statements, which may have 
some effect in moderating the uncharitable judgments 



268 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

upon Oxford discipline. The first respects the age of 
those who are the objects of this discipline ; on which 
point a very grave error prevails. In the last Parliament, 
not once, but many times over, Lord Brougham and others 
assumed that the students of Oxford were chiefly boys ; 
and this, not idly or casually, but pointedly, and with a 
view to an ulterior argument ; for instance, by way of 
proving how little they were entitled to judge of those 
thirty-nine articles to which their assent was demanded. 
Now, this argued a very extraordinary ignorance ; and the 
origin of the error showed the levity in which their legis- 
lation was conducted. These noble Lords had drawn their 
ideas of a university exclusively from Glasgow. Here, it 
is well known, and I mention it neither for praise nor 
blame, that students are in the habit of coming at the 
early age of fourteen. These may allowably be styled 
boys. But, with regard to Oxford, eighteen is about the 
earliest age at which young men begin their residence : 
twenty and upwards is, therefore, the age of the majority ; 
that is, twenty is the minimum of age for the vast ma- 
jority ; as there must always be more men of three years 1 
standing, than of two or of one. Apply this fact to the 
question of discipline : young men beyond twenty, gen- 
erally — that is to say, of the age which qualifies men for 
seats in the national council — can hardly, with decency, 
either be called or treated as boys \ and many things be- 
come impossible as applied to them, which might be of 
easy imposition upon an assemblage ideally childish. In 
mere justice, therefore, when speculating upon this whole 
subject of Oxford discipline, the reader must carry along 
with him, at every step, the recollection of that signal 
difference as to age, which I have now stated, between Ox- 
onians and those students whom the hostile party contem- 



OXFORD. 269 

plate in their arguments.* Meantime, to show that, even 
under every obstacle presented by this difference of age, 
the Oxford authorities do, nevertheless, administer their 
discipline with fidelity, with intrepidity, and w r ith indiffer- 
ence as respects the high and the low, I shall select from 
a crowd of similar recollections two anecdotes, which are 
but trifles in themselves, and yet are not such to him who 



* Whilst I am writing, a debate of the present Parliament, reported 
on Saturday, March 7, 1835, presents us with a determinate repetition 
of the error which I have been exposing-; and, again, as in the last 
Parliament, this error is not inert, but is used for a hostile (apparently a 
malicious) purpose ; nay, which is remarkable, it is the sole basis upon 
which the following argument reposes. Lord Radnor again assumes 
that the students of Oxford are ' boys ; ' he is again supported in this 
misrepresentation by Lord Brougham; and again the misrepresentation 
is applied to a purpose of assault upon the English universities, but 
especially upon Oxford. And the nature of the assault does not allow 
any latitude in construing the word boys, nor any room for evasion as 
respects the total charge, except what goes the length of a total retrac- 
tion. The charge is, that, in a requisition made at the very threshold of 
academic life, upon the understanding and the honor of the students, 
the LTniversity burdens their consciences to an extent, which, in after 
life, when reflection has enlightened them to the meaning of their en- 
gagements, proves either a snare to those who trifle with their engage- 
ments, or an insupportable burden to those who do not. For the 
inculpation of the party imposing such oaths, it is essential that the 
party taking them should be in a childish condition of the moral sense, 
and the sense of responsibility; whereas, amongst the Oxonian under- 
graduates, I will venture to say that the number is larger of those who 
rise above, than of those who fall below twenty ; and, as to sixteen, 
(assumed as the representative age by Lord Radnor,) in my time, I 
heard of only one student, amongst, perhaps, sixteen hundred, who was 
so young. I grieve to see that the learned Prelate, who replied to the 
assailants, was so much taken by surprise; the defence might have 
been made triumphant. With regard to oaths incompatible with the 
spirit of modern manners, and yet formally unrepealed — that is a case 
of neglect and indolent oversight. But the gravamen of that reproach 
does not press exclusively upon Oxford— all the ancient institutions of 
Europe are tainted in the same way, more especially the monastic orders 
of the Romish Church. 



270 LIFE AND MAXXERS. 

recognises them as expressions of a uniform system of 
dealing. 

A great Whig Lord (Earl C ) happened (it may be 

ten years ago), to present himself one day at Trinity (the 
leading college of Cambridge), for the purpose of intro- 
ducing Lord F ch, his son, as a future member of that 

splendid society. Possibly it mortified his aristocratic 
feelings to hear the head of the college, even whilst wel- 
coming the young nobleman in courteous terms, yet sug- 
gesting, with some solemnity, that, before taking any final 
resolution in the matter, his Lordship would do well to 
consider whether he were fully prepared to submit himself 
to college discipline ; for that, otherwise, it became his 
own duty frankly to declare that the college would not 
look upon his accession to their society as any advantage. 
This language arose out of some recent experience of 
refractor}- and turbulent conduct upon the part of various 
young men of rank ; but it is very possible that the noble 
Earl, in his surprise at a salutation so uncourtly, might 
regard it, in a Tory mouth, as having some lurking refer- 
ence to his own Whig politics. If so, he must have been 
still more surprised to hear of another case, which would 
meet him before he left Cambridge, and which involved 
some frank dealing as well as frank speaking, when a 
privilege of exception might have been presumed, if Tory 
politics, or services the most memorable, could ever create 

such a privilege. The Duke of W had two sons at 

Oxford. The affair is now long past ; and it cannot injure 
either of them to say, that one of the brothers trespassed 
against the college discipline, in some way, which com- 
pelled (or was thought to compel) the presiding authorities 
into a solemn notice of his conduct. Expulsion appeared 
to be the appropriate penalty of his offences : but, at this 
point, a just hesitation arose. Not in any servile spirit. 



OXFORD. 271 

but under a proper feeling of consideration for so eminent 
a public benefactor as this young nobleman's father, the 
rulers paused — and at length signified to him, that he was 
at liberty to withdraw himself privately from the college, 
but, also, and at the same time, from the University. He 
did so ; and his brother, conceiving him to have been 
harshly treated, withdrew also ; and both transferred 
themselves to Cambridge. That could not be prevented : 
but there they were received with marked reserve. One 
was not received, I believe, in a technical sense ; and the 
other was received conditionally ; and such restrictions 
were imposed upon his future conduct as served most 
amply, and in a case of great notoriety, to vindicate the 
claims of discipline, and, in an extreme case, a case so 
eminently an extreme one that none like it is ever likely 
to recur, to proclaim the footing upon which the very 
highest rank is received at the English Universities. Is 
that footing peculiar to them ? I willingly believe that it 
is not ; and, with respect to Edinburgh and Glasgow, I am 
persuaded that their weight of dignity is quite sufficient, 
and would be exerted to secure the same subordination 
from men of rank, if circumstances should ever bring as 
large a number of that class within their gates, and if 
their discipline were equally applicable to the habits of 
students not domiciled within their walls. But, as to the 
smaller institutions for education within the pale of dissent, 
I feel warranted in asserting, from the spirit of the anec- 
dotes which have reached me, that they have not the 
auctoritas requisite for adequately maintaining their 
dignity. 

So much for the aristocracy of our English Universi- 
ties : their glory is, and the happiest application of their 
vast influence, that they have the power to be republican, 
as respects their internal condition. Literature, by substi- 



272 



LIFE AND MANNERS, 



tuting a different standard of rank, tends to republican 
equality ; and, as one instance of this, properly belonging 
to the chapter of servants, which originally led to this 
discussion, it ought to be known that the class of ■ servitors,' 
once a large body in Oxford, have gradually become prac- 
tically extinct under the growing liberality of the age. 
They carried in their academic dress a mark of their 
inferiority ; they waited at dinner on those of higher rank, 
and performed other menial services, humiliating to them- 
selves, and latterly felt as no less humiliating to the gen- 
eral name and interests of learning. The better taste, or 
rather the relaxing pressure of aristocratic prejudice 
arising from the vast diffusion of trade and the higher 
branches of mechanic art, have gradually caused these 
functions of the order (even where the law would not 
permit the extinction of the order) to become obsolete. 
In my time, I was acquainted with two servitors : but one 
of them was rapidly pushed forward into a higher station ; 
and the other complained of no degradation, beyond the 
grievous one of exposing himself to the notice of young 
women in the streets, with an untasselled cap ; but this he 
contrived to evade, by generally going abroad without his 
academic dress. The servitors of Oxford are the sizars 
of Cambridge; and I believe the same changes* have 
taken place in both. 

One only account with the college remains to be 
noticed ; but this is the main one. It is expressed in the 
bills by the word battels, derived from the old monkish 
word patella, (or batella,) a plate ; and it comprehends 



* These changes have been accomplished, according to my imperfect 
knowledge of the case, in two ways: first. 1 y dispensing with the ser- 
vices whenever that could be done; and. secondly, by a wise discon- 
tinuance of the order itself in those colleges which were left to their 
own choice in this mailer. 



OXFORD. 273 

whatsoever is furnished for dinner and for supper, includ- 
ing malt liquor, but not wine, as well as the materials for 
breakfast, or for any casual refreshment to country visiters, 
excepting only groceries. These, together with coals and 
faggots, candles, wine, fruit, and other more trifling extras, 
which are matters of personal choice, form so many 
private accounts against your name, and are usually fur- 
nished by tradesmen living near to the college, and send- 
ing their servants daily to receive orders. Supper, as a 
meal not universally taken, in many colleges is served 
privately in the student's own room ; though some colleges 
still retain the ancient custom of a public supper. But 
dinner is, in all colleges, a public meal, taken in the refec- 
tory or ' hall ' of the society ; which, with the chapel and 
library, compose the essential public suite belonging to 
every college alike. No absence is allowed, except to the 
sick, or to those who have formally applied for permission 
to give a dinner party. A fine is imposed on all other 
cases of absence. Wine is not generally allowed in the 
public hall, except to the ' high table,' i. e., the table at 
which the fellows and some other privileged persons are 
entitled to dine. The head of the college rarely dines in 
public. The other - tables, and, after dinner, the high 
table, usually adjourn to their wine, either upon invitations 
to private parties, or to what are called the ' common 
rooms' of the several orders — graduates and undergradu- 
ates, &c. The dinners are always plain, and without 
pretensions — those, I mean, in the public hall ; indeed 
nothing can be plainer in most colleges — a simple choice 
between two or three sorts of animal food, and the com- 
mon vegetables. No fish, even as a regular part of the 
fare ; no soups, no game ; nor, except on some very rare 
festivity, did I ever see a variation from this plain fare at 
Oxford. This, indeed, is proved sufficiently by the aver- 



274 LIFE AND MANNERS 

age amount of the battels. Many men • battel ' at the rate 
of a guinea a week : I did so for years : that is, at the rate 
of three shillings a day for everything connected with 
meals, excepting only tea, sugar, milk, and wine. It is 
true, that wealthier men, more expensive men, and more 
careless men, often ' battelled ' much higher ; but, if they 
persisted in this excess, they incurred censures, more and 
more urgent, from the head of the college. 

Now, let us sum up ; premising, that the extreme dura- 
tion of residence in any college at Oxford amounts to 
something under thirty weeks. It is possible to keep 
'short terms,' as the phrase is, by a residence of thirteen 
weeks, or ninety-one days ; but, as this abridged residence 
is not allowed, except in here and there a college, I shall 
assume — as something beyond the strict maximum of 
residence — thirty weeks as my basis. The account will 
then stand thus : — 

1. Rooms, £10 10 

2. Tutorage 10 10 

3. Servants, (subject to the explanations made 

above,) say 550 

4. Battels, (allowing one shilling a day beyond 

what I and others spent in much dearer 
times j i. e. allowing twenty-eight shillings 
weekly,) for thirty weeks, '. 40 4 

£66 9 

This will be a liberal calculation for the college bill. 
What remains? 1. Candles, which the reader will best 
calculate upon the standard of his own general usage in 
this particular. 2. Coals, which are remarkably dear at 
Q x f or( i — dearer, perhaps, than anywhere else in the 
island ; say, three times as dear as at Edinburgh. 3. 
Groceries. 4. Wine. 5. Washing. This last article 



OXFORD. 275 

was, in my time, regulated by the college, as there were 
certain privileged washerwomen, between whom and the 
students it was but fair that some proper authority should 
interfere to prevent extortion, in return for the monopoly 
granted. Six guineas was the regulated sum ; but this 
paid for everything, table-linen, &c, as well as for wear- 
ing apparel ; and it was understood to cover the whole 
twenty-eight or thirty weeks. However, it w T as open to 
every man to make his own arrangements, by insisting on 
a separate charge for each separate article. All other 
expenses of a merely personal nature, such as postage, 
public amusements, books, clothes, &c, as they have no 
special connection with Oxford, but would, probably, be 
balanced by corresponding, if not the very same, expenses 
in any other place or situation, I do not calculate. What 
I have specified are the expenses which would accrue 
to a student in consequence of leaving l>is father's house. 
The rest would, in these days, be the same, perhaps, 
everywhere. How much, then, shall w r e assume as the 
total charge on account of Oxford ? Candles, considering 
the quantity of long days amongst the thirty weeks, may 
be had for Is. 6d. a week ; for few students — unless they 
have lived in India,- after which a physical change occurs 
in the sensibility of the nostrils — are finical enough to 
burn wax-lights. This will amount to £2 5s. Coals, say 
sixpence a day ; for threepence a day will amply feed one 
grate in Edinburgh ; and there are many weeks in the 
thirty which will demand no fire at all. Groceries and 
wine, which are all that remain, I cannot calculate. But 
suppose we allow for the first a shilling a day, which will 
be exactly ten guineas for thirty weeks ; and for the 
second, nothing at all. Then the extras, in addition to 
the college bills, will stand thus : — 



276 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

Washing for thirty weeks, at the privileged rate, £6 6 

Candles, 2 5 

Fire, 550 

Groceries, 10 10 

Total, £24 6 

The college bills, therefore, will be £66 9s. ; the 
extras, not furnished by the college, will be about c£24 
6s. — making a total amount of <£90 15s. And for this 
sum, annually, a man may defray every expense incident 
to an Oxford life, through a period of weeks (viz. 30) 
something more than he will be permitted to reside. It is 
true, that, for the Jirst year, there will be, in addition to 
this, his outfit ; and for every year, there will be his 
journeys. There will also be twenty-two weeks uncov- 
ered by this estimate : but for these it is not my business 
to provide, who deal only with Oxford. 

That this estimate is true, I know too feelingly. Would 
that it were not ! would that it were false ! Were it so, 
I might the better justify to myself that commerce with 
fraudulent Jews which led me so early to commence the 
dilapidation of my small fortune. It is true ; and true for 
a period (1804-6) far dearer than this. And to any man 
who questions its accuracy, I address this particular 
request — that he will lay his hand upon the special item 
which he disputes. I anticipate that he will answer thus : 
— C I dispute none: it is not by positive things that your 
estimate errs, but bv negations. It is the absence of all 
allowance for indispensable items that vitiates the calcula- 
tion.' Very well : but to this, as to other things, we may 
apply the words of Dr. Johnson — i Sir, the reason I drink 
no wine, is because I can practise abstinence, but not tem- 
perance.' Yes : in all things, abstinence is easier than 
temperance ; for a little enjoyment has invariably the 
effect of awaking the sense of enjoyment, irritating it, and 



OXFORD. 277 

setting it on edge. I, therefore, recollecting my own case, 
have allowed for no wine parties. Let our friend, the 
abstraction we are speaking of, give breakfast parties, if 
he chooses to give any ; and certainly to give none at all, 
unless he were dedicated to study, would seem very churl- 
ish. Nobody can be less a friend than myself to monkish 
and ascetic seclusion, unless it were for twenty-three hours 
out of the twenty-four. 

But, however this be settled, let no mistake be made : 
nor let that be charged against the system which is due to 
the habits of individuals. Early in the last century, Dr. 
Newton, the head of a college in Oxford, wrote a large 
book against the Oxford system, as ruinously expensive. 
But then, as now, the real expense was due to no cause 
over which the colleges could exercise any effectual con- 
trol. It is due exclusively to the habits of social inter- 
course amongst the young men ; from which he may 
abstain who chooses. But for any academic authorities 
to interfere by sumptuary laws with the private expendi- 
ture of grown men, many of them, in a legal sense, of age, 
and all near it, must appear romantic and extravagant, for 
this (or, indeed, any) stage of society. A tutor being 
required, about 1810., to fix the amount of allowance for a 
young man of small fortune, nearly related to myself, pro- 
nounced ^320 little enough. He had this allowance, and 
was ruined, in consequence of the credit which it procured 
for him, and the society it connected him with. The 
majority have <£200 a year : but my estimate stands good 
for all that. 

Having stated, generally, the expenses of the Oxford 
system, I am bound, in candor, to mention one variety in 
the mode of carrying this system into effect, open to every 
man's adoption, which confers certain privileges, but, at 
the same time, (by what exact mode, I know not,) con- 



278 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

siderably increases the cost, and in that degree disturbs 
my calculation. The great body of undergraduates, or 
students, are divided into two classes — Commoners, and 
Gentlemen Commoners. Perhaps nineteen out of twenty 
belong to the former class ; and it is for that class, as 
having been my own, that I have made my estimate. The 
other class of Gentlemen Commoners, (who, at Cambridge, 
bear the name of Fellow Commoners,) wear a peculiar 
dress, and have some privileges which naturally imply 
some corresponding increase of cost ; but why this in- 
crease should go to the extent of doubling the total 
expense, as it is generally thought to do, or how it can go 
to that extent, I am unable to explain. The differences 
which attach to the rank of c Gentleman Commoners,' 
are these : — At his entrance, he pays double ' caution 
money ' — that is, whilst Commoners in general pay about 
twenty-five guineas, he pays fifty ; but this can occur only 
once ; and, besides, in strict point of right, this sum is 
only a deposit, and is liable to be withdrawn on leaving 
the University, though it is commonly enough finally pre- 
sented to the college in the shape of plate. The next 
difference is, that, by comparison with the Commoner, he 
wears a much more costly dress. The Commoner's gown 
is made of what is called princess stuff ; and, together 
with the cap, costs about five guineas. But the Gentle- 
man Commoner has two gowns — an undress for the 
morning, and a full dress-gown for the evening ; both are 
made of silk, and the latter is very elaborately orna- 
mented. The cap also is more costly, being covered with 
velvet instead of cloth. At Cambridge, again, the tassel 
is made of gold fringe or bullion, which, in Oxford, is 
peculiar to the caps of noblemen ; and there are many 
other varieties in that University, where the dress for 
c pensioners,' (i. e. the Oxford 'Commoners,') is specially 



oxforu. 279 

varied in almost every college ; the object being, perhaps, 
to give a ready means to the academic officers for ascer- 
taining, at a glance, not merely the general fact that such 
or such a delinquent is a gownsman, (which is all that 
can be ascertained at Oxford,) but also the particular 
college to which he belongs. Allowance being made for 
these two items of fi dress ' and i caution-money,' both of 
which apply only to the original outfit, I know of no 
others in which the expenditure of a Gentleman Com- 
moner ought to exceed, or could with propriety exceed, 
those of a Commoner. He has, indeed, a privilege as 
regards the choice of rooms ; he chooses first, and prob- 
ably chooses those rooms w r hich, being best, are dearest ; 
that is, they are on a level with the best ; but usually 
there are many sets almost equally good ; and of these 
the majority will be occupied by Commoners. So far, 
there is little opening for a difference. More often, again, 
it will happen that a man of this aristocratic class keeps a 
private servant ; yet this happens also to Commoners, and 
is, besides, no properly college expense. Tutorage is 
charged double to a Gentleman Commoner — viz., twenty 
guineas a year: this is done upon a fiction (as it sometimes 
turns out) of separate attention, or aid given in a private 
way to his scholastic pursuits. Finally, there arises natu- 
rally another and peculiar source of expense to the ' Gen- 
tleman Commoner,' from a fact implied in his Cambridge 
designation of c Fellow Commoner,' commensalis — viz., 
that he associates at meals with the c fellows ' and other 
authorities of the college. Yet this again expresses rather 
the particular shape which his expenditure assumes than 
any absolute increase in its amount. He subscribes to a 
regular mess, and pays, therefore, whether present or not ; 
but so, in a partial sense, does the Commoner, by his 
forfeits for c absent commons.' He subscribes also to a 



280 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

regular fund for wine ; and, therefore, he does not enjoy 
that immunity from wine-drinking which is open to the 
Commoner. Yet, again, as the Commoner docs but 
rarely avail himself of this immunity, as he drinks no less 
wine than the Gentleman Commoner, and, generally 
speaking, wine not worse in quality, it is difficult to see 
any ground for a regular assumption of higher expendi- 
ture in the one class than the other. However, the 
universal impression favors that assumption. All people 
believe that the rank of Gentleman Commoner imposes 
an expensive burden, though few people ever ask why. 
As a matter of fact, I believe it to be true, that Gentlemen 
Commoners spend more by a third, or a half, than any 
equal number of Commoners, taken without selection. 
And the reason is obvious : those who become Gentlemen 
Commoners are usually determined to that course by the 
accident of having very large funds ; they are eldest sons, 
or only sons, or men already in possession of estates, or 
else (which is as common a case as all the rest put to- 
gether) they are the heirs of newly acquired wealth — 
sons of the nouveaux riches — a class which often requires 
a generation or two to rub off the insolence of a too con- 
scious superiority. I have called them an c aristocratic ' 
class ; but, in strictness, they are not such ; they form 
a privileged class indeed, but their privileges are few and 
trifling, not to add that these very privileges are connected 
with one or two burdens, more than outweighing them in 
the estimate of many ; and, upon the whole, the chief 
distinction they enjoy is that of advertising themselves to 
the public as men of great wealth or great expectations ; 
and, therefore, as subjects peculiarly adapted to fraudulent 
attempts. Accordingly, it is not found that the sons of 
the nobility are much inclined to enter this order : these, 
if they happen to be the eldest sons of Earls, or of any 



OXFORD. 281 

Peers above the rank of Viscount, so as to enjoy a title 
themselves by the courtesy of England, have special 
privileges in both Universities as to length of residence, 
degrees, &,c. ; and their rank is ascertained by a special 
dress. These privileges it is not usual to forego ; though 
sometimes that happens, as in my time, in the instance of 
Lord George Grenville, (now Lord Nugent ;) he neither 
entered at the aristocratic college, (Christ Church,) nor 
wore the dress of a nobleman. Generally, however, an 
elder son appears in his true character of nobleman ; but 
the younger sons rarely enter the class of Gentlemen 
Commoners. They enter either as ■ Commoners,' or 
under some of those various designations ( ; scholars? 
1 demies? ' students? ' junior fellows ') which imply that 
they stand upon the foundation of the college to w^iich 
they belong, and are aspirants for academic emoluments. 
Upon the whole, I am disposed to regard this order of 
Gentlemen Commoners as a standing temptation held out 
by authority to expensive habits, and a very unbecoming 
proclamation of honor paid to the aristocracy of wealth. 
And I know that many thoughtful men regard it in the 
same light with myself, and regret deeply that any such 
distribution of ranks should be authorized, as a stain upon 
the simplicity and general manliness of the English ac- 
ademic laws. It is an open profession of homage and 
indulgence to wealth, as wealth — to wealth disconnected 
from everything that might ally it to the ancestral honors 
and heraldries of the land. It is also an invitation, or 
rather a challenge, to profuse expenditure. Regularly, 
and by law, a Gentleman Commoner is liable to little 
heavier burdens than a Commoner ; but to meet the ex- 
pectations of those around him, and to act up to the part 
he has assumed, he' must spend more, and he must be 
more careless in controlling his expenditure, than a mod- 
19 



2S"2 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

erate and prudent Commoner. In every light, therefore, 
I condemn the institution, and give it up to the censures of 
the judicious. So much in candor I concede. But, to 
show equal candor on the other side, it must be remem- 
bered that this institution descends to us from ancient 
times, when wealth was not so often divided from territo- 
rial or civic honors, conferring a real precedency. 



CHAPTER X. 

OXFORD. 

There was one reason why I sought solitude at that 
early age, and sought it in a morbid excess, which must 
naturally have conferred upon my character some degree 
of that interest which belongs to all extremes. My eye 
had been couched into a secondary power of vision, by 
misery by solitude, by sympathy with life in all its modes, 
by experience too early won, and by the sense of danger 
critically escaped. Suppose the case of a man suspended 
by some colossal arm over an unfathomed abyss — sus- 
pended, but finally and slowly withdrawn — it is probable 
that he would not smile for years. That was my case : 
for I have not mentioned, in the c Opium Confessions,' a 
thousandth part of the sufferings I underwent in London 
and in Wales ; partly because the misery was too monot- 
onous, and in that respect unfitted for description ; but 
still more, because there is a mysterious sensibility con- 
nected with real suffering which recoils from circumstantial 
rehearsal or delineation, as from violation offered to some- 
thing sacred, and which is, or should be dedicated to 
privacy. Grief does not parade its pangs, nor the anguish 
of despairing hunger willingly count again its groans or 
its humiliations. Hence it was that Ledyard, the traveller, 
speaking of his Russian experiences, used to say that 
some of his miseries were such, that he never would 



284 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

reveal them. Besides all which, I really was not at liberty 
to speak, without many reserves, on this chapter of my 
life, at a period (1821) not twenty years removed from 
the actual occurrences, unless I desired to court the risk 
of crossing at every step the existing law of libel, so full 
of snares and mantraps, to the careless, equally with the 
conscientious writer. This is a consideration which some 
of my critics have lost sight of in a degree which sur- 
prises me. One, for example, puts it to his readers 
whether any house such as I describe as the abode of rny 
money-lending friend, could exist i in Oxford Street;' 
and, at the same time he states, as circumstances drawn 
from my description, but, in fact, pure coinages of his 
own, certain romantic impossibilities, which doubtless 
could as little attach to a house in Oxford Street, as they 
could to a house in any other quarter of London. Mean- 
time, I had sufficiently indicated that, whatsoever street 
was concerned in that affair, Oxford Street was not ; and 
it is remarkable enough, as illustrating this amiable re- 
viewer's veracity, that no one street in London was abso- 
lutely excluded hut one ; and that one Oxford Street. 
For I happened to mention that, on such a day, (my 
birth-day,) I had turned aside from Oxford Street to look 
at the house in question. I will now add that this house 
was in Greek Street : so much it may be safe to say. 
But every candid reader will see. that both prudential 
restraints, and also disinterested regard to the feelings of 
possibly amiable descendants from a vicious man, would 
operate with any thoughtful writer in such a case, to 
impose reserve upon his pen. Had my guardians, had 
my money-lending friend of Jewry, and others concerned 
in my memoirs, been so many shadows, bodiless abstrac- 
tions, and without earthly connections, I might readily 
have given my own names to my own creations ; and 



OXFORD. 285 

have treated them as unceremoniously as I pleased ; not 
so, under the real circumstances of the case. My chief 
guardian, for instance, though obstinate to a degree which 
risked the happiness and the life of his ward, was an 
upright man otherwise : and his children are entitled to 
value his memory. 

Again, my Greek Street TQantuW^c, the ' fcznerator Al- 
pheusS who delighted to reap where he had not sown, and 
too often (I fear) allowed himself in practices which not 
impossibly have long since been found to qualify him for 
distant climates and ' Botanic ' regions — even he, though 
I might truly describe him as a mere highwayman, when- 
ever he happened to be aware that I had received a friend- 
ly loan, yet, like other highwaymen of repute, and 4 gentle 
thieves,' was not inexorable to the petitions of his victim : 
he would sometimes toss back what was required for some 
instant necessity of the road ; and at his breakfast table 
it was, after all, as elsewhere recorded, that I contrived to 
support life ; barely indeed, and most slenderly, but still 
with the final result of escaping absolute starvation. With 
that recollection before me, I could not allow myself to 
probe his frailties too severely, had it even been certainly 
safe to do so. But enough : the reader will understand 
that a year spent either in the valleys of Wales, or upon 
the streets of London, a wanderer, too often houseless in 
both situations, might naturally have peopled the mind of 
one constitutionally disposed to solemn contemplations 
with memorials of human sorrow and strife too profound 
to pass away for years. 

Thus, then, it was — past experience of a very peculiar 
kind, the agitations of many lives crowded into the com- 
pass of a year or two, in combination with a peculiar 
structure of mind — offered one explanation of the very 
remarkable and unsocial habits which I adopted at college : 



286 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

but there was another not less powerful and not less un- 
usual. In stating this, I shall seem, to some persons, 
covertly designing an affront to Oxford. But that is far 
from my intention. It is noways peculiar to Oxford ; but 
will, doubtless, be found in every university throughout 
the world — that the younger part of the members, the 
undergraduates, I mean, generally, whose chief business 
must have lain amongst the great writers of Greece and 
Rome, cannot have found leisure to cultivate extensively 
their own domestic literature. Not so much that time 
will have been wanting ; but that the whole energy of the 
mind, and the main course of the subsidiary studies and 
researches, will naturally have been directed to those 
difficult languages, amongst which lie their daily tasks. 
I make it no subject of complaint or scorn, therefore, but 
simply state it as a fact, that few or none of the Oxford 
undergraduates, with whom parity of standing threw me 
into collision at my first outset, knew anything at all of 
English literature. The Spectator seemed to me the 
only English book of a classical rank which they had 
read ; and even this less for its inimitable delicacy, 
humor, and refined pleasantry in dealing with manners 
and characters, than for its insipid and meagre essays, 
ethical or critical. This was no fault of theirs : they had 
been sent to the book chiefly as a subject for Latin trans- 
lations, or of other exercises ; and, in such a view, the 
vague generalities of superficial morality were more use- 
ful and more manageable than sketches of manner or 
character, steeped in national peculiarities. To translate 
the terms of Whig politics into classical Latin, would be 
as difficult as it might be for a Whig himself to give a 
consistent account of those politics from the year 1688. 
Natural, however, and excusable as this ignorance might 
be, to myself it was intolerable and incomprehensible. 



OXFORD. 287 

Already, at fifteen, I had made myself familiar with the 
great English poets. About sixteen, or not long after, 
my interest in the story of Chatterton had carried me over 
the whole ground of the Rowley controversy ; and that 
controversy, by a necessary consequence, had so familia- 
rized me with the ■ Black Letter,' that I had begun to 
find an unaffected pleasure in the ancient English metrical 
romances ; and, in Chaucer, though acquainted as yet 
only with part of his works, I had perceived and had felt 
profoundly those divine qualities, w T hich, even at this day, 
are so languidly acknowledged by his unjust countrymen. 
With this knowledge, and this enthusiastic knowledge of 
the elder poets — of those most remote from easy access — 
I could not well be a stranger in other walks of our litera- 
ture, more on a level with the general taste, and nearer 
to modern diction, and, therefore, more extensively multi- 
plied by the press. 

Yet, after all, as one proof how much more commanding 
is that part of a literature which speaks to the elementary 
affections of men, than that which is founded on the 
mutable aspects of manners — it is a fact that, even in 
our elaborate system of society, where an undue value is 
unavoidably given to the whole science of social inter- 
course, and a continual irritation applied to the sensibilities 
which point in that direction ; still, under all these advan- 
tages, Pope himself is less read, less quoted, less thought 
of, than the* elder and graver section of our literature. 
It is a great calamity for an author such as Pope, that, 
generally speaking, it requires so much experience of 
life to enjoy his peculiar felicities, as must argue an age 
likely to have impaired the general capacity for enjoy- 
ment. For my part, I had myself a very slender ac- 
quaintance with this chapter of our literature ; and w T hat 
little I had was generally, at that period of my life, as, 



288 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

with most men, it continues to be to the end of life, a 
reflex knowledge, acquired through those pleasant mis- 
cellanies, half gossip, half criticism — such as Warton's 
Essay on Pope, Boswell's Johnson, Mathias's Pursuits of 
Literature, and many scores beside of the same indeter- 
minate class ; a class, however, which do a real service 
to literature, by diffusing an indirect knowledge of fine 
writers in their most effective passages, where else, in a 
direct shape, it would often never extend. 

In some parts, then, having even a profound knowledge 
of our literature, in all parts having some, I felt it to be 
impossible that I should familiarly associate with those 
who had none at all ; not so much as a mere historical 
knowledge of the literature in its capital names and their 
chronological succession. Do I mention this in dispar- 
agement of Oxford ? By no means. Among the under- 
graduates of higher standing, and occasionally, perhaps, 
of my own, I have since learned that many might have 
been found eminently accomplished in this particular. 
But seniors do not seek after juniors ; they must be 
sought ; and, with my previous bias to solitude, a bias 
equally composed of impulses and motives, I had no dis- 
position to take trouble in seeking any man for any 
purpose. 

But, on this subject, a fact still remains to be told, of 
which I am justly proud ; and it will serve, beyond any- 
thing else that I can say, to measure the aVgree of my 
intellectual development. On coming to Oxford, I had 
taken up one position in advance of my age by full thirty 
years : that appreciation of Wordsworth, which it has 
taken full thirty years to establish amongst the public, I 
had already made, and had made* operative to my own 
intellectual culture in the same year when I clandestinely 
quitted school. Already, in 1802, 1 had addressed a letter 



OXFORD. 289 

of fervent admiration to Mr. Wordsworth. I did not send 
it until the spring of 1803 ; and, from misdirection, it did 
not come into his hands for some months. But. I had an 
answer from Mr. Wordsworth before I was eighteen ; and 
that my letter was thought to express the homage of an 
enlightened admirer, may be inferred from the fact that 
his answer was long and full. On this anecdote, 1 do not 
mean to dwell : but I cannot allow the reader to overlook 
the circumstances of the case. At this day, it is true, no 
journal can be taken up which does not habitually speak 
of Mr. Wordsworth as of a great if not the great poet of 
the age. Mr. Bulwer, living in the intensest pressure of 
the world, and, though recoiling continually from the 
judgments of the world, yet never in any violent degree, 
ascribes to Mr. Wordsworth (in his England and the 
English, p. 308,) ' an influence of a more noble and 
purely intellectual character, than any writer of our age 
or nation has exercised.' Such is the opinion held of this 
great poet in 1835; but what were those of 1805-15, 
nay, of 1825 ? For twenty years after the date of that 
letter to Mr. Wordsworth above referred to, language was 
exhausted, ingenuity was put on the rack, in the search 
after images and expressions vile enough — insolent 
enough — to convey the unutterable contempt avowed for 
all that he had written by the fashionable critics. One 
critic — who still, I believe, edits a rather popular journal, 
and who belongs to that class, feeble, fluttering, ingenious, 
who make it their highest ambition not to lead, but, with 
a slave's adulation, to obey and to follow all the caprices 
of the public mind — described Mr. Wordsworth as re- 
sembling, in the quality of his mind, an old nurse babbling 
in her paralytic dotage to sucking babies. If this insult 
was peculiarly felt by Mr. Wordsworth, it was on a con- 
sideration of the unusual imbecility of him who offered it, 



290 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

and not because in itself it was baser or more insolent 
than the language held by the majority of journalists who 
then echoed the public voice. Blackwood'' s Magazine 
(1817) first accustomed the public ear to the language of 
admiration coupled with the name of Wordsworth. This 
began with Professor Wilson; and well I remember — 
nay, the proofs are still easy to hunt up — that, for eight 
or ten years, this singularity of opinion, having no coun- 
tenance from other journals, was treated as a whim, a 
paradox, a bold extravagance of the Blackwood critics. 
Mr. Wordsworth's neighbors in Westmoreland, who had 
(generally speaking) a profound contempt for him, used 
to rebut the testimony of Blackwood by one constant 
reply — i Ay, Blackwood praises Wordsworth, but who 
else praises him ? ' In short, up to 1820, the name of 
Wordsworth was trampled under foot ; from 1820 to 1830 
it was militant ; from 1830 to 1835 it has been trium- 
phant. In 1803, when I entered at Oxford, that name was 
absolutely unknown ; and the finger of scorn pointed at it 
in 1S02 by the first or second number of the Edinburgh 
Review, failed to reach its mark from absolute defect of 
knowledge in the public mind. Some fifty beside myself 
knew who was meant by ■ that poet who had cautioned 
his friend against growing double,' &c. ; to all others it 
was a profound secret. 

These things must be known and understood properly to 
value the prophetic eye and the intrepidity of two persons, 
like Professor Wilson and myself, who, in 1802-3, at- 
tached themselves to a banner not yet raised and planted ; 
who outran, in fact, their contemporaries by one entire 
generation ; and did that about 1S02 which the rest of the 
world are doing in chorus about 1532. 

Professor Wilson's period at Oxford exactly coincided 
with my own ; yet, in that large world, we never met. I 



OXFORD. 291 

know, therefore, but little of his policy in regard to such 
opinions or feelings as tended to dissociate him from the 
mass of his coevals. This only I know, that he lived as 
it were in public ; and must, therefore, I presume, have 
practised a studied reserve as to his deepest admirations ; 
and, perhaps, at that day (1803-8) the occasions would 
be rare in which much dissimulation would be needed. 
Until Lord Byron had begun to pilfer from Wordsworth 
and to abuse him, allusions to Wordsworth were not fre- 
quent in conversation ; and it was chiefly on occasion of 
some question arising about poetry in general, or about 
the poets of the day, that it became difficult to dissemble. 
For my part, hating the necessity for dissimulation as 
much as the dissimulation itself, I drew from this pecu- 
liarity also of my own mind, a fresh reinforcement of my 
other motives for sequestering myself; and, for the first 
two years of my residence in Oxford, I compute that I did 
not utter one hundred words. 

I remember distinctly the first (which happened also to 
be the last) conversation that I ever held with my tutor. 
It consisted of three sentences, two of which fell to his 
share, one to mine. On a fine morning, he met me in the 
Quadrangle, and having then no guess of the nature of 
my pretensions, he determined (I suppose) to probe them. 
Accordingly, he asked me, c What I had been lately 
reading ? ' Now, the fact was, that I, at that time im- 
mersed in metaphysics, had really been reading and study- 
ing very closely the Parmenides, of which obscure work 
some Oxford men, early in the last century, published a 
separate edition. Yet, so profound was the benignity of 
my nature, that, in those days, I could not bear to witness, 
far less to cause, the least pain or mortification to any 
human being. I recoiled, indeed, from the society of 
most men, but not with any feelings of dislike. On the 



292 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

contrary, in order that I might like all men, I wished to 
associate with none. Now, then, to have mentioned the 
Parvnenides to one who, fifty thousand to one, was a 
perfect stranger to its whole drift and purpose, looked too 
mechant, too like a trick of malice in an age when such 
reading was so very unusual. I felt that it would be taken 
for an express stratagem for stopping my tutor's mouth. 
All this passing rapidly through my mind, I replied with- 
out hesitation, that I had been reading Paley. My tutor's 
rejoinder I have never forgotten : l Ah ! an excellent 
author ; excellent for his matter ; only you must be on 
your guard as to his style ; he is very vicious there."* 
Such was the colloquy ; we bowed, parted, and never 
more (I apprehend) exchanged one word. Now, trivial 
and trite as this comment on Paley may appear to the 
reader, it struck me forcibly that more falsehood, or more 
absolute falsehood, or more direct inversion of the truth, 
could not, by any artifice of ingenuity, have been crowded 
into one short sentence. Paley, as a philosopher, is a 
jest, the disgrace of the age ; and, as regards the two 
Universities and the enormous responsibility they under- 
take for the books which they sanction by their official 
examinations for degrees, the name of Paley is their great 
opprobrium. But, on the other hand, for style, Paley is a 
master. Homely, racy, vernacular English, the rustic 
vigor of a style which intentionally foregoes the graces of 
polish on the one hand, and of scholastic precision on the 
other, that quality of merit has never been attained in a 
degree so eminent. This first interchange of thought 
upon a topic of literature did not tend to slacken my 
previous disposition to retreat into solitude ; a solitude, 
however, which at no time w r as tainted with either the 
moroseness or the pride of a cynic. 

Neither must the reader suppose, that, even in that day, 



OXFORD. 293 

I belonged to the party who disparage the classical writers, 
or the classical training of the great English schools. 
The Greek drama I loved and revered. But, to deal 
frankly — because it is a subject which I shall hereafter 
bring before the public — I made great distinctions. I 
was not that indiscriminate admirer of Greek and Roman 
literature, which those too generally are who admire it at 
all. This protesting spirit, against a false and blind idola- 
try, was with me, at that time, a matter of enthusiasm — 
almost of bigotry. I was a bigot against bigots. Let us 
take the Greek oratory, for example: — What section of 
the Greek literature is more fanatically exalted, and 
studiously in depreciation of our own ? Let us judge 
of the sincerity at the base of these hollow affectations, 
by the downright facts and the producible records. To 
admire, in any sense which can give weight and value to 
your admiration, presupposes, I presume, some acquaint- 
ance with its object. As the earliest title to an opinion, 
one way or other, of the Greek eloquence, we ought to 
have studied some of its most distinguished artists ; or, 
say one, at least ; and this one, we may be sure, will be, 
as it ought to be, Demosthenes. Now, it is a fact, that 
all the copies of Demosthenes sold within the last hundred 
years would not meet the demand of one considerable 
town, were that orator a subject of study amongst even 
classical scholars. I doubt whether, at this day, there 
exist twenty men in Europe who can be said to have even 
once read Demosthenes ; and therefore it was that, when 
Mr. Mitford, in his ; History of Greece,' took a new view 
of this orator's political administration — a view which 
lowered his character for integrity — he found an unre- 
sisting acceder to his doctrines in a public having no 
previous opinion upon the subject, and, therefore, open to 
any casual impression of malice or rash judgment. Had 



294 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

there been any acquaintance with the large remains which 
we still possess of this famous orator, no such wrong 
could have been done. I, from rny childhood, had been 
a reader, nay, a student of Demosthenes ; and, simply, 
for this reason, that, having meditated profoundly on the 
true laws and philosophy of diction, and of what is vaguely 
denominated style, and finding nothing of any value in 
modern writers upon this subject, and not much as regards 
the grounds and ultimate principles even in the ancient 
rhetoricians, I have been reduced to collect my opinions 
from the great artists and practitioners, rather than 
from the theorists ; and, among those artists, in the most 
plastic of languages, I hold Demosthenes to have been the 
greatest. 

The Greek is, beyond comparison, the most plastic of 
languages. It was a material which bent to the purposes 
of him who used it beyond the material of other lan- 
guages ; it was an instrument for a larger compass of 
modulations ; and it happens that the peculiar theme of 
an orator imposes the very largest which is consistent 
with a prose diction. One step farther in passion, and 
the orator would become a poet. An orator can exhaust 
the capacities of a language — an historian never. More- 
over, the age of Demosthenes was, in my judgment, the 
age of highest development for arts dependent upon social 
refinement. That generation had fixed and ascertained 
the use of words ; whereas, the previous generation of 
Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, &c, was a transitional 
period : the language was still moving and tending to a 
meridian not yet attained ; and the public eye had been 
directed consciously upon language, as in and for itself 
an organ of intellectual delight, for too short a time, to 
have mastered the whole art of managing its resources. 
All these were reasons for studying Demosthenes, as 



OXFORD. 295 

the one great model and standard of Attic prose ; and, 
studied him I had, more than any other prose writer what- 
ever. Pari passu, I had become sensible that others had 
not studied him. One monotonous song of applause I 
found raised on every side ; something about being c like 
a torrent, that carries everything before it.' This original 
image is all we get in the shape of criticism ; and never 
any attempt even at illustrating what is greatest in him, or 
characterizing what is most peculiar. The same persons 
who discovered that Lord Brougham was the modern 
Bacon, have also complimented him with the title of the 
English Demosthenes. Upon this hint, Lord Brougham, 
in his address to the Glasgow students, has deluged the 
great Athenian with wordy admiration. There is an obvi- 
ous prudence in lodging your praise upon an object from 
which you count upon a rebound to yourself. But here, 
as everywhere else, you look in vain for any marks or 
indications of a personal and direct acquaintance with the 
original orations. The praise is built rather upon the 
popular idea of Demosthenes, than upon the real Demos- 
thenes. And not only so, but even upon style itself, and 
upon the art of composition in abstracto, Lord Brougham 
does not seem to have formed any clear conceptions — 
principles he has none. Now, it is useless to judge of 
an artist until you have some principles on the art. The 
two capital secrets in the art of prose composition are 
these : — 1st, The philosophy of transition and connection, 
or the art by which one step in an evolution of thought 
is made to arise out of another : all fluent and effective 
composition depends on the connections ; — 2dly, The way 
in which sentences are made to modify each other ; for, 
the most powerful effects in written eloquence arise out of 
this reverberation, as it were, from each other in a rapid 
succession of sentences : and, because some limitation is 



296 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

necessary to the length and complexity of sentences, in 
order to make this interdependency felt, hence it is that 
the Germans have no eloquence. The construction of 
German prose tends to such immoderate length of sen- 
tences, that no effect of intermodification can ever be 
apparent. Each sentence, stuffed with innumerable 
clauses .of restriction, and other parenthetical circum- 
stances, becomes a separate section — an independent 
whole. But, without insisting on Lord Brougham's over- 
sights, or errors of defect, I will digress a moment to one 
positive caution of his, which will measure the value of 
his philosophy on this subject. He lays it down for a 
rule of indefinite application, that the Saxon part of our 
English idiom is to be favored at the expense of that 
part which has so happily coalesced with the language 
from the Latin or Greek. This fancy, often patronized 
by other writers, and even acted upon, resembles that 
restraint which some metrical writers have imposed upon 
themselves — of writing a long copy of verses, from 
which some particular letter, or from each line of which 
some different letter should be carefully excluded. What 
followed ? Was the reader sensible, in the practical 
effect upon his ear, of any beauty attained ? By no 
means; all the difference, sensibly perceived, lay in 
the occasional constraints and affectations to which the 
writer had been driven by his self-imposed necessities. 
The same chimera exists in Germany ; and so much 
farther is it carried, that one great puritan in this heresy 
(Wolf) has published a vast dictionary, the rival of Ade- 
lung's, for the purpose of expelling every word of foreign 
origin and composition out of the language, by assigning 
some equivalent term spun out from pure native Teutonic 
materials. Bayonet, for example, is patriotically rejected, 
because a word may be readily compounded tantamount 



OXFORD. 297 

to musket- dirk ; and this sort of composition thrives 
showily in the German, as a language running into 
composition with a fusibility only surpassed by the 
Greek. 

But what good purpose is attained by such caprices ? 
In three sentences the sum of the philosophy may be 
stated. It has been computed (see Duclos) that the 
Italian opera has not above six hundred words in its 
whole vocabulary : so narrow is the range of its emo- 
tions, and so little are those emotions disposed to expand 
themselves into any variety of thinking. The same 
remark applies to that class of simple, household, homely 
passion, which belongs to the early ballad poetry. Their 
passion is of a quality more venerable, it is true, and 
deeper than that of the opera, because more permanent 
and co-extensive with human life ; but it is not much 
wider in its sphere, nor more apt to coalesce with con- 
templative or philosophic thinking. Pass from these 
narrow fields of the intellect, where the relations of the 
objects are so few and simple, and the whole prospect 
so bounded, to the immeasurable and sea-like arena upon 
which Shakspeare careers — co-infinite with life itself — 
yes, and with something more than life. Here is the 
other pole, the opposite extreme. And what is the choice 
of diction ? What is the lexis ? Is it Saxon exclusively, 
or is it Saxon by preference ? So far from that, the 
Latinity is intense — not, indeed, in his construction, but 
in his choice of words ; and so continually are these Latin 
words used, with a critical respect to their earliest (and 
where that happens to have existed, to their unfigurative) 
meaning, that, upon this one argument, I would rely for 
upsetting the else impregnable thesis of Dr. Farmer as to 
Shakspeare's learning. Nay, I will affirm that, out of this 
regard to the Latin acceptation of Latin words, may be 
20 



298 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

absolutely explained the Shakspearian meaning of certain 
words, which has hitherto baffled all his critics. For 
instance, the word modern, of which Dr. Johnson pro- 
fesses himself unable to explain the rationale or principle 
regulating its Shakspearian use, though he felt its value, 
it is to be deduced thus : — First of all, change the pro- 
nunciation a little, by substituting for the short o, as we 
pronounce it in modern, the long o, as heard in modish, 
and you will then, perhaps, perceive the process of anal- 
ogy by which it passed into the Shakspearian use. The 
matter or substance of a thing is, usually, so much more 
important than its fashion or manner, that we have hence 
adopted, as one way for expressing what is important as 
opposed to what is trivial, the word material. Now, by 
parity of reason, we are entitled to invert this order, and 
to express what is unimportant by some word indicating 
the mere fashion or external manner of an object as 
opposed to its substance. This is effected by the word 
modal or modern, as the adjective from modus, a fashion 
or manner ; and, in that sense, Shakspeare employs the 
word. Thus, Cleopatra, undervaluing to Ca?.sar's agent 
the bijouterie which she has kept back from inventory, 
and which her treacherous steward had betrayed, de- 
scribes them as mere trifles — 

1 Such gifts as we greet modern friends withal ; ' 

where all commentators have felt that modern must form 
the position, mean, slight, and inconsiderable, though 
perplexed to say how it came by such a meaning. A 
modern friend is, in the Shakspearian sense, with relation 
to a real and serviceable friend, that which the fashion of 
a thing is, by comparison with its substance. But a still 
better illustration may be taken from a common line, 
quoted every day, and ludicrously misinterpreted. In the 



OXFORD. 299 

famous picture of life — c All the world's a stage ' — the 
justice of the piece is described as 

1 Full of wise saws and modern instances ; ' 

which (liorrendum dictu !) has been explained, and, I 
verily believe, is generally understood to mean, full of 
wise sayings and modern illustrations. The true mean- 
ing is — full of proverbial maxims of conduct and of 
trivial arguments; i. e. of petty distinctions, or verbal 
disputes, such as never touch the point at issue. The 
word, modern, I have already deduced ; the word, in- 
stances, is equally Latin, and equally used by Shakspeare 
in its Latin sense. It is originally the word, instantia, 
which, by the monkish and scholastic writers, is uniformly 
used in the sense of an argument, and originally of an 
argument urged in objection to some previous argument.* 
I affirm, therefore, that Lord Brougham's counsel to the 
Glasgow students is not only bad counsel — and bad 



* I cannot for a moment believe that the original and most eloquent 
critic in Blackwood is himself the dupe of an argument, which he has 
alleged against this passage, under too open a hatred of Shakspeare, as 
though it involved a contradiction to common sense, by representing all 
human beings of such an age as schoolboys, all of such another age as 
soldiers, of such another as magistrates, &c. Evidently the logic of 
the famous passage is this — that whereas every age has its peculiar 
and appropriate temper, that profession or employment is selected for 
the exemplification which seems best fitted, in each case, to embody the 
characteristic or predominating quality. Thus, because impetuosity, 
self-esteem, and animal or irreflective courage, are qualities most intense 
in youth, next it is considered in what profession those qualities find 
their most unlimited range ; and, because that is obviously the military 
profession, therefore it is that the soldier is selected as the representative 
of young men. For the same reason, as best embodying the peculiar 
temper of garrulous old age, the magistrate comes forward as supporting 
the part of that age. Not that old men are not also soldiers : but that 
the military profession, so far from strengthening, moderates and tem- 
pers the characteristic temper of old age. 






300 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

counsel for the result, as well as for the grounds, which 
are either capricious or nugatory — but also that, in the 
exact proportion in which the range of thought expands, it 
is an impossible counsel, an impracticable counsel — a 
counsel having for its purpose to embarrass and lay the 
mind in fetters, where even its utmost freedom, and its 
largest resources will be found all too little for the grow- 
ing necessities of the intellect. c Long-tail'd words in osity 
and ation ! ' what does that describe ? Exactly the Latin 
part of our language. Now, those very terminations 
speak for themselves: — All high abstractions end in 
ation, that is, they are Latin ; and, just in proportion as 
the abstracting power extends and widens, do the circles 
of thought widen, and the horizon or boundary (contra- 
dicting its own Grecian name) melts into the infinite. On 
this account it was that Coleridge (Biographia Liter aria) 
remarks on Wordsworth's philosophic poetry, that, in pro- 
portion as it goes into the profound of passion and of 
thought, do the words increase which are vulgarly called 
1 dictionary words.' Now these words, these 'dictionary' 
words, what are they ? Simply words of Latin or Greek 
origin : no other words, no Saxon words, are ever called 
by illiterate persons dictionary words. And these dic- 
tionary words are indispensable to a writer, not only in 
the proportion by which he transcends other writers as to 
extent and as to subtility of thinking, but also as to ele- 
vation and sublimity. Milton was not an extensive or 
discursive thinker, as Shakspeare was ; for the motions of 
his mind were slow, solemn, sequacious, like those of the 
planets ; not agile and assimilative ; not attracting all 
things within its own sphere ; not multiform : repulsion 
w T as the law of his intellect — he moved in solitary gran- 
deur. Yet, merely from this quality of grandeur — unap- 
proachable grandeur — his intellect demanded a larger 



OXFORD. 301 

infusion of Latinity into his diction. For the same reason 
(and, without such aids, he would have had no proper 
element in which to move his wings) he enriched his 
diction with Hellenisms and with Hebraisms ; * but never, 



* The diction of Milton is a case absolutely unique in literature: of 
many writers it has been said, but of him only with truth, that he 
created a peculiar language. The value must be tried by the result, not 
by inferences from d priori principles: such inferences might lead us to 
anticipate an unfortunate result : whereas, in fact, the diction of Milton 
is such that no other could have supported his majestic style of think- 
ing. The final result is a transcendent answer to all adverse criticism ; 
but still it is to be lamented that no man properly qualified, has under- 
taken the examination of the Miitonic diction as a separate problem. 
Listen to a popular author of this day, (Mr. Bulwer.) He, speaking on 
this subject, asserts, (England and the English, p. 329.) that ' 7 here is 
scarcely an English idiom which Milton has not violated, or a .foreign 
one which he has not borroxoedS Now, in answer to this extravagant 
assertion, I will venture to say that the two following are the sole cases 
of questionable idiom throughout Milton: — 1st, : Yet virgin of Proser- 
pine from Jove ; ' and, in this case, the same thing might be urged in 
apology which Aristotle urges in another argument, viz., that awnvuov 
to nuOog, the case is unprovided with any suitable expression. How 
would it be possible to convey in good English the circumstances here 
indicted — viz., that Ceres was yet in those days of maiden innocence, 
when she had borne no daughter to Jove ? 2d, I will cite a case which, 
so far as I remember, has been noticed by no commentator; and, prob- 
ably, because they have failed to understand it. The case occurs in the 
'Paradise Regained;' but where I do not at this moment remember. 
'Will they transact with God?' This is the passage; and a most 
flagrant instance it offers of pure Latinism. Transigere, in the lan- 
guage of the civil law, means to make a compromise ; and the word 
transact is here used in that sense — a sense utterly unknown to the 
English language. This is the worst case in Milton; and I do not 
know that it has been ever noticed. Yet even here it may be doubted 
whether Milton is not defensible ; asking if they proposed to terminate 
their difference with God after the fashion in use amongst courts of law, 
he points properly enough to these worldly settlements by the technical 
term which designated them. Thus, might a divine say — Will he arrest 
the judgments of God by a demurrer? Thus, again, Hamlet apostro- 
phizes the lawyer's skull by the technical terms used in actions for 
assault, &e. Besides, what proper term is there in English for express- 



302 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

as could be easy to show, without a full justification in the 
result. Two things may be asserted of all his exotic 
idioms — 1st, That they express what could not have 
been expressed by any native idiom ; 2d, That they har- 
monize with the English language, and give a coloring of 
the antique, but not any sense of strangeness to the 
diction. Thus, in the double negative — l Not did they 
not perceive,' &c, which is classed as a Hebraism — if 
any man fancy that it expresses no more than the simple 
affirmative, he shows that he does not understand its 
force ; and, at the same time, it is a form of thought so 
natural and universal, that I have heard English people, 
under corresponding circumstances, spontaneously fall 
into it. In short, whether a man differ from others by 
greater profundity or by greater sublimity, and whether 
he write as a poet or as a philosopher, in any case, he 
feels, in due proportion to the necessities of his intellect, 
an increasing dependence upon the Latin section of 
the English language ; and the true reason why Lord 
Brougham failed to perceive this, or found the Saxon 
equal to his wants, is one which I shall not scruple to 
assign, inasmuch as it does not reflect personally on Lord 
Brougham, or, at least, on him exclusively, but on the 
whole body to which he belongs. That thing which he 
and ihey call by the pompous name of statesmanship, but 
which is, in fact, statescr^aft — the art of political intrigue 
— deals (like the opera) with ideas so few in number and 
so little adapted to associate themselves with other ideas, 
that, possibly, in the one case equally as in the other, six 
hundred words are sufficient to meet all their demands. 



ing a compromise? Edmund Burke, and other much older authors, 
express the idea by the word temperament ; but that word, though a 
good one, was atone time considered an exotic term — equally a Gal- 
licism and a Latinism. 



OXFORD. 303 

I have used my privilege of discursiveness to step aside 
from Demosthenes to another subject, no otherwise con- 
nected with the attic orator than, first, by the common 
reference of both subjects to rhetoric ; but, secondly, by 
the accident of having been jointly discussed by Lord 
Brougham, in a paper, which (though now forgotten) ob- 
tained, at the moment, most undue celebrity. For it is 
one of the infirmities of the public mind with us — that 
whatever is said or done by a public man, any opinion 
given by a member of Parliament, however much out of 
his own proper jurisdiction and range of inquiry, com- 
mands an attention not conceded even to those who 
speak under the known privilege of professional knowl- 
edge. Thus, Cowper was not discovered to be a poet 
worthy of any general notice, until Charles Fox — a most 
slender critic — had vouchsafed to quote a few lines, and 
that, not so much with a view to the poetry, as to its party 
application. But now, returning to Demosthenes, I affirm 
that his case is the case of nearly all the classical writers, 
at least of all the prose writers. It is, I admit, an extreme 
one — that is, it is the general case in a more intense 
degree. Raised almost to divine honors, never mentioned 
but with affected rapture, the classics of Greece and 
Rome are seldom read — most of them never ; are they, 
indeed, the closet companions of any man ? Surely it is 
time that these follies were at an end ; that our practice 
were made to square a little better with our professions ; 
and that our pleasures were sincerely drawn from those 
sources in which we pretend that they lie. 

The Greek language, mastered in any eminent degree, 
is the very rarest of all acomplishments, and precisely 
because it is unspeakably the most difficult. Let not the 
reader dupe himself by popular cant. To be an ac- 
complished Grecian, demands a very peculiar quality of 



304 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

talent ; and it is almost inevitable, that one who is such 
should be vain of a distinction which represents so much 
labor and difficulty overcome. For myself, having, as 
a schoolboy, attained to a very unusual mastery over 
this language, and (though as yet little familiar with the 
elaborate science of Greek metre) moving through all the 
obstacles and resistances of a Greek book with the same 
celerity and ease as through those of the French and 
Latin, I had, in vanquishing the difficulties of the lan- 
guage, lost the main stimulus to its cultivation. Still, I 
read Greek daily ; but any slight vanity which I might 
connect with a power so rarely attained, and which, under 
ordinary circumstances, so readily transmutes itself into a 
disproportionate admiration of the author, in me was ab- 
solutely swallowed up in the tremendous hold taken of 
my entire sensibilities at this time by our own literature. 
With what fury would I often exclaim — He who loveth 
not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love 
God whom he hath not seen ? You, Mr. A, L, M, O, 
you who care not for Milton, and value not the dark sub- 
limities which rest ultimately (as we all feel) upon dread 
realities, how can you seriously thrill in sympathy with the 
spurious and fanciful sublimities of the classical poetry — 
with the nod of the Olympian Jove, or the seven-league 
strides of Neptune ? Flying Childers had the most pro- 
digious stride of any horse on record ; and at Newmarket 
that is justly held to be a great merit ; but it is hardly a 
qualification for a Pantheon. The parting of Hector and 
Andromache — that is tender, doubtless ; but how many 
passages of far deeper, far diviner tenderness are to be 
found in Chaucer ! Yet, in these cases, we give our 
antagonist the benefit of an appeal to what is really best 
and most effective in the ancient literature. For, if we 
should go to Pindar, and some other great names, what a 



OXFORD. 305 

revelation of hypocrisy as respects the fade enthusiasts 
for the Greek poetry ! 

Still, in the Greek tragedy, however otherwise embit- 
tered against ancient literature by the dismal affectations 
current in the scenical poetry, at least, I felt the presence 
of a great and original power. It might be a power in- 
ferior, upon the whole, to that which presides in the 
English tragedy ; I believed that it was ; but it was 
equally genuine, and appealed equally to real and deep 
sensibilities in our nature. Yet, also, I felt that the two 
powers at work, in the two forms of the drama, were es- 
sentially different ; and without having read a line of 
German at that time, or knowing of any such controversy, 
I began to meditate on the elementary grounds of differ- 
ence between the Pagan and the Christian forms of 
poetry. The dispute has since been carried on extensively 
in France, not less than in Germany, as between the 
classical and the romantic. But I will venture to assert 
that not one step in advance has been made, up to this 
day. The shape into which I threw the question, it may 
be well to state ; because I am persuaded that out of that 
one idea, properly pursued, might be evolved the whole 
separate characteristics of the Christian and the antique : 
Why is it, I asked, that the Christian idea of sin is an idea 
utterly unknown to the Pagan mind ? The Greeks and 
Romans had a clear conception of a moral ideal, as we 
have ; but this they estimated by a reference to the will ; 
and they called it virtue, and the antithesis they called 
vice. The lachete or relaxed energy of the will, by 
which it yielded to the seductions of sensual pleasure, that 
was vice : and the braced-up tone by which it resisted 
these seductions, was virtue. But the idea of holiness 
and the antithetic idea of sin, as a violation of this awful 
and unimaginable sanctity, was so utterly undeveloped in 



306 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

the Pagan mind, that no word exists in classical Greek or 
classical Latin, which approaches either pole of this syn- 
thesis ; neither the idea of holiness, nor of its correlate, 
sin, could be so expressed in Latin as at once to satisfy 
Cicero and a scientific Christian. Again, (but this was 
some years after.) I found Schiller and Goethe applauding 
the better taste of the ancients, in symbolizing the idea of 
death, by a beautiful youth, with a torch inverted, &c. as 
compared with the Christian types of a skeleton and hour 
glasses, 6cc. And much surprised I was to hear Mr. Cole- 
ridge approving of this German sentiment. Yet here 
again I felt the peculiar genius of Christianity was cov- 
ertly at work moving upon a different road, and under 
opposite ideas, to a just result, in which the harsh and 
austere expression yet pointed to a dark reality, whilst the 
beautiful Greek adumbration was, in fact, a veil and a 
disguise. The corruptions and the other ■ dishonors ' of 
the grave, and whatsoever composes the sting of death, in 
the Christian view, is traced up to sin as its ultimate cause. 
Hence, besides the expression of Christian humility, in 
thus nakedly exhibiting the wrecks and ruins made by sin, 
there is also a latent profession indicated of Christian 
hope. For the Christian contemplates steadfastly, though 
with trembling awe, the lowest point of his descent ; 
since, for him, that point, the last of his fall, is also the 
first of his re-ascent, and serves, besides, as an exponent 
of its infinity ; the infinite depth becoming, in the re- 
bound, a measure of the infinite re-ascent. Whereas, on 
the contrary, with the gloomy uncertainties of a Pagan on 
the question of his final restoration, and also (which must 
not be overlooked) with his utter perplexity as to the 
nature of his restoration, if any were by accident in 
reserve, whether in a condition tending downwards or up- 
wards, it was the natural resource to consult the general 



OXFORD. 307 

feeling of anxiety and distrust, by throwing a thick cur- 
tain and a veil of beauty over the whole too painful 
subject. To place the horrors in high relief, coulu here 
have answered no purpose but that of wanton cruelty ; 
whereas, with the Christian hopes, the very saddest me- 
morials of the havocks made by death, are antagonist 
prefigurations of great victories in the rear. 

These speculations, at that time, I pursued earnestly ; 
and I then believed myself, as I yet do, to have ascer- 
tained the two great and opposite laws under which the 
Grecian and the English tragedy has each separately 
developed itself. Whether wrong or right in that belief, 
sure I am that those in Germany, w T ho have treated the 
case of Classical and Romantic, are not entitled to credit 
for any discovery at ali. The Schlegels, w T ho were the 
hollowest of men — the windiest and wordiest — (at least, 
Frederick was so) — pointed to the distinction ; barely 
indicated it ; and that was already some service done, 
because a presumption arose that the antique and the 
modern literatures, having clearly some essential differ- 
ences, might, perhaps, rest on foundations originally 
distinct, and obey different laws. And hence it occurred 
that many disputes,, as about the unities, &c, might 
originate in a confusion of these laws. This checks the 
presumption of the shallow criticism, and points to deeper 
investigations. Beyond this, neither the German nor the 
French disputers on the subject have talked to any profit- 
able purpose. 

I have mentioned Paley as accidentally connected with 
my debut in literary conversation : and I have taken occa- 
sion to say how much I admired his style and its unstudied 
graces — how profoundly I despised his philosophy. I shall 
here say a word or two more on that subject. As respects 
his style, though secretly despising the opinion avowed by 



308 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

my tutor, (which was, however, a natural opinion for a 
stiff lover of the artificial and the pompous,) I would just 
as unwillingly be supposed to adopt the extravagant opin- 
ions, in the other extreme, of Dr. Parr and Mr. Coleridge. 
These two gentlemen, who privately hated Paley, and, 
perhaps, traduced him, have hung like bees over one par- 
ticular paragraph in his Evidences, as though it were a 
flower transplanted from Hymettus. Dr. Parr pronounced 
it the finest sentence in the English language. It is a 
period (i. e. a cluster of sentences) moderately well, but 
not too well constructed, as the German nurses are accus- 
tomed to say. Its felicity depends on a trick easily imi- 
tated — on a balance happily placed, (viz., 'in ivliich the 
wisest of mankind would rejoice to find an answer to their 
doubts, and rest to their inquiries.'') As a bravura or 
tour deforce, in the dazzling fence of rhetoric, it is sur- 
passed by many hundreds of passages which might be 
produced from rhetoricians ; or, to confine myself to 
Paley's contemporaries, it is very far surpassed by a par- 
ticular passage in Burke's letter upon the Duke of Bedford's 
base attack upon him in the House of Lords ; which pas- 
sage I shall elsewhere produce, because I happen to know, 
on the authority of Burke's executors, that Burke himself 
considered it the finest period which he had ever written. 
At present, I will only make one remark, viz., that it is 
always injudicious, in the highest degree, to cite for admi- 
ration, that which is not a representative specimen of the 
author's manner. In reading Lucian, I once stumbled on 
a passage of German pathos, and of German effect. 
Would it have been wise, or would it have been intellec- 
tually just, to quote this as the text of an eulogium on 
Lucian ? What false criticism it would have suggested 
to every reader! — what false anticipations ! To quote a 
formal and periodic pile of sentences, was to give the 



OXFORD. 309 

feeling, that Paley was what the regular rhetorical artists 
designate as a periodic writer, when, in fact, no one con- 
ceivable character of style more pointedly contradicted 
the true description of his merits. 

But, leaving the style of Paley, I must confess that I 
agree with Mr. Buhver (England and the English) in 
thinking it shocking and almost damnatory to an English 
university, the great well-heads of creeds, moral and 
evangelical, that authors, such in respect of doctrine, as 
Paley, and Locke, should hold that high and influential 
station, as teachers, or rather oracles of truth, which has 
been conceded to them. As to Locke, I, when a boy, 
had made a discovery of one blunder full of laughter and 
of fun, which, had it been published and explained in 
Locke's lifetime, would have tainted his whole philosophy 
with suspicion. It relates to the Aristotelian doctrine of 
syllogism, which Locke undertook to ridicule : now, a 
flaw, a hideous flaw, in the soi-disant detecter of flaws — 
a ridicule in the exposer of the ridiculous — that is fatal ; 
and I am surprised that Lee, who wrote a folio against 
Locke in his lifetime, and other examiners, should have 
failed of detecting this. I shall expose it elsewhere ; and, 
perhaps, one or two other exposures of the same kind will 
give an impetus to the descent of this falling philosophy. 
With respect to Paley, and the naked prudentialism of 
his system, it is true, that, in a longish note, Paley dis- 
claims that consequence. But to this we may reply, with 
Cicero, Non qucero quid neget Epicurus, sed quid congru- 
enter neget. Meantime, waving all this as too notorious, 
and too frequently denounced, I wish to recur to this trite 
subject, by way of stating an objection made to the Pa- 
leyan morality in my seventeenth year, and which I have 
never since seen reason to withdraw. It is this : — I affirm 
that the whole work, from first to last, proceeds upon that 



310 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

sort of error which the logicians call ignoratio elenchi, 
i. e., ignorance of the very question concerned — of the 
point at issue. For, mark, in the very vestibule of ethics, 
two questions arise — two different and disconnected ques- 
tions, A and B ; and Paley has answered the wrong one. 
Thinking that he was answering A, and meaning to 
answer A, he has, in fact , answered B. One question 
arises thus : — Justice is a virtue ; temperance is a virtue : 
and so forth. Now, what is the common principle which 
ranks these several species under the same genus ? What, 
in the language of logicians, is the common differential 
principle which determines these various aspects of moral 
obligation to a common genius ? Another question, and 
a more interesting question to men in general, is this : — 
What is the motive to virtue ? By what impulse, law, or 
motive am I impelled to be virtuous rather than vicious ? 
Whence is the motive derived which should impel me to 
one line of conduct in preference to the other ? This, 
which is a practical question, and, therefore, more inter- 
esting than the other, which is a pure question of specula- 
tion, was that which Paley believed himself to be answering. 
And his answer was — That utility, a perception of the 
resulting benefit, was the true determining motive. Mean- 
time, it was objected, that often the most obvious results 
from a virtuous action, were far otherwise than beneficial. 
Upon which Paley, in the long note referred to above, 
distinguished thus — That whereas actions have many re- 
sults, some proximate, some remote, just as a stone thrown 
into the water produces many concentric circles, be it 
known that he, Dr. Paley, in what he says of utility, con- 
templates only the final result, the very outermost circle ; 
inasmuch as he acknowledges a possibility that the first, 
second, third, including the penultimate circle, may all 
happen to clash with utility ; but then, says he, the outer- 



OXFORD. 311 

most circle of all will never fail to coincide with the abso- 
lute maximum of utility. Hence, in the first place, it 
appears that you cannot apply this test of utility in a 
practical sense ; you cannot say, This is useful, ergo, it is 
virtuous ; but, in the inverse order, you must say, This is 
virtuous, ergo, it is useful. You do not rely on its useful- 
ness to satisfy yourself of its being virtuous ; but, on the 
contrary, you rely on its virtuousness, previously ascer- 
tained, in order to satisfy yourself of its usefulness. And 
thus the whole practical value of this test disappears, 
though in that view it was first introduced ; and a vicious 
circle arises in the argument ; as you must have ascer- 
tained the virtuousness of an act, in order to apply the 
test of its being virtuous. But, secondly, it now comes 
out that Paley was answering a very different question 
from that which he supposed himself answering. Not any 
practical question as to the motive or impelling force in 
being virtuous, rather than vicious — i. e., as to the sanc- 
tions of virtue — but a purely speculative question, as to 
the issue of virtue, or the common vinculum amongst the 
several modes or species of virtue, (justice, temperance, 
&c. ;) this was the real question which he was answering. 
I have often remarked that the largest and most subtle 
source of error in philosophic speculations, has been the 
confounding of the two great principles so much insisted 
on by the Leibnitzians, viz., the ratio cognoscendi, and 
the ratio essendi. Paley believed himself to be assigning 
— it was his full purpose to assign — the ratio cognoscendi ; 
but, instead of that, unconsciously and surreptitiously, he 
has actually assigned the ratio essendi : and, after all, a 
false and imaginary ratio essendi. 



CHAPTER XL 

GERMAN LITERATURE. 

Using a New Testament, of which (in the narrative 
parts at least) any one word being given will suggest 
most of what is most immediately consecutive, you evade 
the most irksome of the penalties annexed to the first 
breaking ground in a new language : you evade the 
necessity of hunting up and down a dictionary. Your 
own memory and the inevitable suggestions of the context 
furnish a dictionary pro hac vice. And afterwards, upon 
advancing to other books, where you are obliged to forego 
such aids, and to swim without corks, you find yourself 
already in possession of the particles for expressing addi- 
tion, succession, exception, inference — in short, of all 
the forms by which transition or connection is erTected, 
(if but, and, therefore, however, notwithstanding.) to- 
gether with all those adverbs for modifying or restraining 
the extent of a subject or a predicate, which in all lan- 
guages alike compose the essential framework or extra- 
linear machinery of human thought. The filling-up — 
the matter (in a scholastic sense) — may differ infinitely ; 
but the form, the periphery, the determining moulds into 
which this matter is fused — all this is the same for ever : 
and so wonderfullv limited in its extent is this frame- 
work, so narrow and rapidly revolving is the clock-work 
of connections among human thoughts, that a dozen 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 313 

pages of almost any book suffice to exhaust all the tTtsa 
njsQotvTu* which express them. To have mastered these 
Insa TiTzQosvTa is in effect to have mastered seven-tenths, 
at the least, of any language ; and the benefit of using a 
New Testament, or the familiar parts of an Old Testa- 
ment, in this preliminary drill, is, that your own memory 
is thus made to operate as a perpetual dictionary or 
nomenclator. I have heard Mr. Southey say that, by 
carrying in his pocket a Dutch, Swedish, or other Testa- 
ment, on occasion of a long journey performed in 6 muggy ' 
weather, and in the inside of some venerable ' old heavy ' 
— such as used to bestow their tediousness upon our re- 
spectable fathers some thirty or forty years ago — he had 
more than once turned to so valuable an account the 
doziness or the dulness of his fellow-travellers, that where- 
as he had ' booked ' himself at the coach-office utterly 
avakyapijTog, unacquainted with the first rudiments of the 
given language, he had made his parting bows to his 
coach brethren, (secretly returning thanks to them for 
their stupidity,) in a condition for grappling with any 
common book in that dialect. One of the polyglot Old or 

* Errsa TTTsQosvra, literally winged words.- To explain the use and 
origin of this phrase to non-classical readers, it must be understood that, 
originally, it was used by Homer to express the few, rapid, and signifi- 
cant words which conveyed some hasty order, counsel, or notice, suited 
to any sudden occasion or emergency : e. g. ' To him flying from the 
field the hero addressed these winged words — " Stop, coward, or I will 
transfix thee with my spear.'" But by Home Tooke, the phrase was 
adopted on the title-page of his Diversions of Purley, as a pleasant 
symbolic expression for all the non-significant particles, the articuli or 
joints of language, which in his well-known theory are resolved into 
abbreviations or compendious forms, (and therefore rapid, flying, icinged 
forms,) substituted for significant forms of greater length. Thus, if is 
a non-significant particle, but it is an abbreviated form of an imperative 
in the second person — substituted for gif, or give, or grant the case — 
put the case that. All other particles are shown by Home Tooke to be 
equally short-hand (or winged) substitutions. 
21 



314 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

New Testaments published by Bagster, would be a perfect 
Encyclopaedia, or Panorganon, for such a scheme of 
coach discipline, upon dull roads and in dull company. 
As respects the German language in particular, I shall 
give one caution, from my own experience, to the self- 
instructor : it is a caution which applies to the German 
language exclusively, or to that more than to any other, 
because the embarrassment which it is meant to meet, 
grows out of a defect of taste characteristic of the German 
mind. It is this : elsewhere you would naturally, as a 
beginner, resort to prose authors, since the license and 
audacity of poetic thinking, and the large freedom of a 
poetic treatment, cannot fail to superadd difficulties of 
individual creation to the general difficulties of a strange 
dialect. But this rule, good for every other case, is not 
good for the literature of Germany. Difficulties there 
certainly are, and perhaps in more than the usual propor- 
tion, from the German peculiarities of poetic treatment ; 
but even these are overbalanced in the result, by the 
single advantage of being limited in the extent by the 
metre, or (as it may happen) by the particular stanza. 
To German poetry there is a known, fixed, calculable 
limit. Infinity, absolute infinity, is impracticable in any 
German metre. Not so with German prose. Style, in 
any sense, is an inconceivable idea to a German intellect. 
Take the word in the limited sense, of what the Greeks 
called 2w6taig drouarwv — i. 6., the construction of sen- 
tences — I affirm that a German (unless it were here and 
there a Lessing) cannot admit such an idea. Books there 
are in German, and, in other respects, very good books 
too, which consist of one or two enormous sentences. A 
German sentence describes an arch between the rising 
and the setting sun. Take Kant for illustration : he has 
actually been complimented by the cloud-spinner, Frederick 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 315 

SchJegel, who is now in Hades, as a most original artist 
in the matter of style. c Original,' Heaven knows he was ! 
His idea of a sentence was as follows : We have all seen 
or read of an old family coach, and the process of pack- 
ing it for a journey to London some seventy or eighty 
years ago. Night and day, for a week at least, sate the 
housekeeper, the lady's maid, the butler, the gentlemen's 
gentleman, &c. packing the huge ark in all its recesses, 
its ' imperials,' its ' wills,' its ' Salisbury boots,' its ' sword- 
cases,' its front pockets, side pockets, rear pockets, its 
4 hammer-cloth cellars,' (which a lady explains to me as a 
corruption from hamper-cloth, as originally a cloth for 
hiding a hamper stored with viaticum,) until all the uses 
and needs of man and of human life, savage or civilized, 
w T ere met with separate provision by the infinite chaos. 
Pretty nearly upon the model of such an old family coach 
packing, did Kant institute and pursue the packing and 
stuffing of one of his regular sentences. Everything that 
could ever be needed in the way of explanation, illustra- 
tion, restraint, inference, by-clauses, or indirect comment, 
was to be crammed, according to this German philoso- 
pher's taste, into the front pockets, side pockets, or rear 
pockets of the one- original sentence. Hence it is that a 
sentence will last in reading whilst a man 

' Might reap an acre of his neighbor's corn.' 

Nor is this any peculiarity of Kant's. It is common to 
the whole family of prose writers of Germany, unless 
when they happen to have studied French models, who 
cultivate the opposite extreme. As a caution, therefore, 
practically applied to this particular anomaly in German 
prose writing, I advise all beginners to choose between 
two classes of composition — ballad poetry, or comedy — 
as their earliest school of exercise ; ballad poetry, because 



316 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

the form of the stanza (usually a quatrain) prescribes a 
very narrow range to the sentences ; comedy, because 
the form of dialogue, and the imitation of daily life in its 
ordinary tone of conversation, and the spirit of comedy 
naturally suggesting a brisk interchange of speech, all 
tend to short sentences. These rules I soon drew from 
my own experience and observation. And the one sole 
purpose towards which I either sought or wished for aid, 
respected the pronunciation ; not so much for attaining a just 
one (which I was satisfied could not be realized out of Ger- 
many, or, at least, out of a daily intercourse with Germans) 
as for preventing the formation, unawares, of a radically 
false one. The guttural and palatine sounds of the c/i, and 
some other German peculiarities, cannot be acquired with- 
out constant practice. But the false Westphalian or Jewish 
pronunciation of the vowels, diphthongs, &c, may easily 
be forestalled, though the true delicacy of Meissen should 
happen to be missed. Thus much guidance 1 purchased, 
with a very few guineas, from my young Dresden tutor, 
who was most anxious for permission to extend his assist- 
ance ; but this I would not hear of: and, in the spirit of 
fierce (perhaps foolish) independence, which governed 
most of my actions at that time of life, I did all the rest for 

myself. 

1 It was a banner broad unfurl'd, 
The picture of that western world.' 

These, or words like these, in which Wordsworth conveys 
the sudden apocalypse, as by an apparition, to an ardent 
and sympathizing spirit, of the stupendous world of 
America, rising, at once, like an exhalation, with all its 
shadowy forests, its endless savannas, and its pomp of 
solitary waters — well and truly might I have applied to 
my first launching upon that vast billowy ocean of the 
German literature. As a past literature, as a literature of 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 317 

inheritance and tradition, the German was nothing. An- 
cestral titles it had none ; or none comparable to those of 
England, Spain, or even Italy; and there, also, it resem- 
bled America, as contrasted with the ancient world of 
Asia, Europe, and North Africa.* But, if its inheritance 
were nothing, its prospects, and the scale of its present 
development, were in the amplest style of American 
grandeur. Ten thousand new books, w r e are assured by 
Menzel, an author of high reputation — a literal myriad — 
is considerably below the number annually poured from 
all quarters of Germany, into the vast reservoir of Leipsic ; 
spawn infinite, no doubt, of crazy dotage, of dreaming 
imbecility, of wickedness, of frenzy, through every phasis 
of Babylonian confusion ; yet, also, teeming and heaving 
with life and the instincts of truth ; of truth hunting and 
chasing in the broad daylight, or of truth groping in the 
chambers of darkness ; sometimes seen as it displays its 
cornucopia of tropical fruitage ; sometimes heard dimly, 
and in promise, working its way through diamond mines. 
Not the tropics, not the ocean, not life itself, is such a 
type of variety, of infinite forms, or of creatire power, 
as the German literature, in its recent motions, (say for 
the last twenty years,) gathering, like the Danube, a fresh 
volume of power at every stage of its advance. A banner 
it was, indeed, to me of miraculous promise, and sud- 
denly unfurled. It seemed, in those days, an El Dorado 
as true and undeceiving as it was evidently inexhaustible. 
And the central object in this interminable wilderness 
of what then seemed imperishable bloom and verdure, 

* It has been rather too much forgotten, that Africa, from the northern 
margin of Bilidulgerid and the Great Desert, southwards — everywhere, 
in short, beyond Egypt, Cyrene, and the modern Barbary States — 
belongs, as much as America, to the New World — the world unknown 
to the ancients. 



318 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

the very tree of knowledge in the midst of this Eden, 
was the new or transcendental philosophy of Immanuel 
Kant. 

I have described the gorgeousness of my expectations 
in those early days of my prelusive acquaintance with 
German literature. I have a little lingered in painting 
that glad aurora of my first pilgrimage to the fountains 
of the Rhine and of the Danube, in order adequately to 
shadow out the gloom and blight which soon afterwards 
settled upon the hopes of that golden dawn. In Kant, I 
had been taught to believe were the keys of a new and 
a creative philosophy. Either ; ejus diictuj or ' ejus au- 
spiciis'' — that is, either directly under his guidance, or 
indirectly under any influence remotely derived from his 
principles — I looked confidingly to seethe great vistas 
and avenues of truth laid open to the philosophic inquirer. 
Alas ! all w T as a dream. Six weeks' study was sufficient 
to close my hopes in that quarter for ever. The philos- 
ophy of Kant — so famous, so commanding in Germany, 
from about the period of the French Revolution — already, 
in 18C5, 1 had found to be a philosophy of destruction, and 
scarcely, in any one chapter, so much as tending to a 
philosophy of reconstruction. It destroys by wholesale, 
and it substitutes nothing. Perhaps in the whole history of 
man, it is an unexampled case, that such a scheme of 
speculation — which offers nothing seducing to human 
aspirations, nothing splendid to the human imagination, 
nothing even positive and affirmative to the human under- 
standing — should have been able to found an interest so 
broad and deep among thirty-five millions of cultivated 
men. The English reader who supposes this interest to 
have been confined to academic bowers, or the halls of 
philosophic societies, is most inadequately alive to the 
case. Sects, heresies, schisms, by hundreds, having arisen 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 319 

out of this philosophy — many thousands of books have 
been written by way of teaching it, discussing it, extend- 
ing it, opposing it. And yet it is a fact, that all its doc- 
trines are negative — teaching, in no case, what we are, 
but simply what we are not to believe — and that all its 
truths are barren. Such being its unpopular character, I 
cannot but imagine that the German people have received 
it with so much ardor, from profound incomprehension of 
its meaning, and utter blindness to its drift — a solution 
which may seem extravagant, but is not so ; for, even 
amongst those who have expressly commented on this 
philosophy, not one of the many hundreds whom I have 
myself read, but has retracted from every attempt to ex- 
plain its dark places. In these dark places lies, indeed, 
the secret of its attraction. Were light poured into them, 
it would be seen that they are culs-de-sac, passages that 
lead to nothing; but, so long as they continue dark, it is 
not known whither they lead, how far, in what direction, 
and whether in fact, they may not issue into paths con- 
nected directly with the positive and the infinite. Were 
it known that upon every path a barrier faces you insur- 
mountable to human steps — like the barriers which fence 
in the Abyssinian valley of Rasselas — the popularity of 
this philosophy would expire at once ; for no popular in- 
terest can long be sustained by speculations which, in 
every aspect, are known to be essentially negative and 
essentially finite. Man's nature has something of infinity 
within itself, which requires a corresponding infinity 
in its objects. We are told, indeed, by Mr. Bulwer, that 
the Kantian system has ceased to be of any authority in 
Germany — that it is defunct, in fact — and that we have 
first begun to import it into England, after its root had 
withered, or begun to wither, in its native soil. But Mr. 
Bulwer is mistaken. The philosophy has never withered 



320 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

in Germany. It cannot even be said that its fortunes have 
retrograded : they have oscillated : accidents of taste and 
ability in particular professors, or caprices of fashion, have 
given a momentary fluctuation to this or that new form of 
Kantianism, — an ascendancy, for a period, to various, and, 
in some respects, conflicting modifications of the transcen- 
dental system ; but all alike have derived their power 
mediately from Kant. No weapons, even if employed as 
hostile weapons, are now forged in any armory but that 
of Kant ; and, to repeat a Roman figure which I used 
above, all the modern polemic tactics of what is called 
metaphysics, are trained and made to move either ejus 
ductu or ejus auspiciis. Not one of the new systems 
affects to call back the Leibnitzian philosophy, the Carte- 
sian, or any other of earlier or later date, as adequate to 
the purposes of the intellect in this day, or as capable of 
yielding even a sufficient terminology. Let this last fact 
decide the question of Kant's vitality. Qui bene distin- 
guit bene docet. This is an old adage. Now, he who 
imposes new names upon all the acts, the functions, and 
the objects of the philosophic understanding, must be 
presumed to have distinguished most sharply, and to have 
ascertained with most precision, their general relations — 
so long as his terminology continues to be adopted. This 
test, applied to Kant, will show that his spirit yet survives 
in Germany. Frederick Schlegel, it is true, twenty years 
ago, in his lectures upon literature, assures us that even 
the disciples of the great philosopher have agreed to 
abandon his philosophic nomenclature. But the German 
philosophic literature, since that date, tells another tale. 
Mr. Bulwer is, therefore, wrong ; and, without going to 
Germany, looking only to France, he will see cause to 
revise his sentence. Cousin — the philosophic Cousin, 
the only great name in philosophy for modern France — 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 321 

familiar as he is with North Germany, can hardly be 
presumed unacquainted with a fact so striking, if it were 
a fact, as the extinction of a system once so triumphantly 
supreme as that of Kant ; and yet Mr. Bulwer, admiring 
Cousin as he does, cannot but have noticed his efforts to 
naturalize Kant in France. Meantime, if it were even 
true that transcendentalism had lost its hold of the public 
mind in Germany, prima facie, this would prove little 
more than the fickleness of that public which must have 
been wrong in one of the two cases — either when adopt- 
ing the system, or when rejecting it. Whatever there 
may be of truth and value in the system, will remain 
unimpeached by such caprices, whether of an individual 
or of a great nation ; and England would still be in the 
right to import the philosophy, however late in the day, if 
it were true even (which 1 doubt greatly) that she is 
importing it. 

Both truth and value there certainly is in one part of 
the Kantian philosophy ; and that part is its foundation. 
I had intended, at this point, to introduce an outline of 
the transcendental philosophy — not, perhaps, as entering 
by logical claim of right into any biographical sketch, but 
as a very allowable -digression in the record of that man's 
life to whom, in the way of hope and of profound disap- 
pointment, it had been so memorable an object. For two 
or three years before I mastered the language of Kant,* 
it had been a pole-star to my hopes, and in hypothesi 

* I might have mastered the philosophy of Kant, without waiting for 
the German langage, in which all his capital works are written ; for 
there is a Latin version of the whole, by Born, and a most admirable 
digest of the cardinal work, (admirable for its fidelity and the skill by 
which that fidelity is attained,) in the same language, by Rhiseldek, a 
Danish professor. But this fact, such was the slight knowledge of 
all things connected with Kant in England, I did not learn for some 
years. 



322 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

agreeably to the uncertain plans of uncertain knowledge, 
the luminous guide to my future life — as a life dedicated 
and set apart to philosophy. Such it i mmm years 
before I knew it : for, at least ten long years after I 
came into a condition of valuing its true pretensions and 
measuring its capacities, this same philosophy shed the 
gloom of something like misanthropy upon my views and 
f human nature ; for man was an abject 
animal, if the limitations which Kant assigned to the 
motions of his speculative reason were as absolute and 
hop: $, under his scheme of the understanding and 

his genesis of its powers, too evidently they were. I 
belouged to a reptile race, if the wings by which we had 
sometimes seemed to mount, and the bouyancy which had 
seemed to support our flight, were indeed the fan! 
delusions which he represented them. Such, and so deep 
and so abiding in its influence upon my life, having been 
the influence of this German philosophy, according to all 
logic of proportions, in selecting the objects of my no* 
I anight be excused for setting before the reader, in its full 
array, the analysis of its capital sections. However, in 
any memorial of a life which prof:— - bo keep in view 
(though but as a secondary purpose) any regard to popular 

, the logic of proportions must bend, after all, to the 
law of the occasion — to the proprieties of time and 
place. For the present, therefore, I shall restrict m 
to the few sentences in which it may be proper to gratify 
the curiosity of some readers, the two or three in a hun- 
dred, as to the peculiar distinctions of this philosophy. 

n to these two or three out of each hundred, I shall 
not venture to ascribe a larger curiosity than with 
to the most general i whereabouts ' of its position — from 
what point it starts — whence and from what aspect it 
surveys the ground — and by what links from this starting 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 323 

point it contrives to connect itself with the main objects 
of philosophic inquiry. 

Immanuel Kant was originally a dogmatist in the school 
of Leibnitz and Wolf; that is, according to his trisection 
of all philosophy into dogmatic, sceptical, and critical, he 
was, upon all questions, disposed to a strong affirmative 
creed, without courting any particular examination into 
the grounds of this creed, or into its assailable points. 
From this slumber, as it is called by himself, he was 
suddenly aroused by the Humian doctrine of cause and 
effect. This celebrated essay on the nature of necessary 
connection — so thoroughly misapprehended at the date 
of its first publication to the world by its soi-disant 
opponents, Oswald, Beattie, &,c, and so imperfectly com- 
prehended since then by various soi-disant defenders — 
became in effect the c occasional cause " (in the phrase of 
the logicians) of the entire subsequent philosophic scheme 
of Kant — every section of which arose upon the acci- 
dental opening made to analogical trains of thought, by 
this memorable effort of scepticism, applied by Hume to 
one capital phenomenon among the necessities of the 
human understanding. What is the nature of Hume's 
scepticism as applied to this phenonenon ? What is the 
main thesis of his celebrated essay on cause and effect ? 
For few, indeed, are they who really know anything 
about it. If a man really understands it, a very few 
words will avail to explain the nodus. Let us try. It is 
a necessity of the human understanding (very probably 
not a necessity of a higher order of intelligences) to 
connect its experiences by means of the idea of cause 
and its correlate, effect : and when Beattie, Oswald, 
Reid, &c, w T ere exhausting themselves in proofs of the 
indispensableness of this idea, they were fighting with 
shadows ; for no man had ever questioned the practical 



324 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

necessity for such an idea to the coherency of human 
thinking. Not the practical necessity, but the internal 
consistency of this notion, and the original right to such 
a notion, was the point of inquisition. For, attend, 
courteous reader, and three separate propositions will set 
before your eyes the difficulty. First Prop., which, for 
the sake of greater precision, permit me to throw into 
Latin : — Non datur aliquid [A] quo posito ponitur 
aliud [B] a priori ; that is, in other words, You cannot 
lay your hands upon that one object or phenomenon [A] 
in the whole circle of natural existences, which, being 
assumed, will entitle you to assume a priori, any other 
object whatsoever [B] as succeeding it. You could not, 
I say, of any object or phenomenon whatever, assume 
this succession a priori — that is, previously to experi- 
ence. Second Prop. But, if the succession of B to A 
be made known to you, not a priori, (by the involution 
of B in the idea of A,) but by experience, then you 
cannot ascribe necessity to the succession : the connection 
between them is not necessary but contingent. For the 
very widest experience — an experience which should 
stretch over all ages, from the beginning to the end of 
time — can never establish a nexus having the least 
approximation to necessity ; no more than a rope of sand 
could gain the cohesion of adamant, by repeating its links 
through a billion of successions. Third Prop. Hence, 
(i. e. from the two preceding propositions,) it appears 
that no instance or case of nexus, that ever can have been 
offered to the notice of any human understanding, has in 
it, or, by possibility, could have had anything of neces- 
sity. Had the nexus been necessary, you would have 
seen it beforehand ; whereas, by Prop. I. Non datur 
aliquid, quo posito ponitur aliud a priori. This being 
so, now comes the startling fact, that the notion of a cause 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 325 

includes the notion of necessity. For, if A (the cause) 
be connected with B (the effect) only in a casual or 
accidental way, you do not feel warranted in calling it a 
cause. If heat, applied to ice (A) were sometimes 
followed by a tendency to liquefaction (B) and some- 
times not, you would not consider A connected with B 
as a cause, but only as some variable accompaniment of 
the true and unknown cause, which might allowably be 
present or be absent. This, then, is the startling and 
mysterious phenomenon of the human understanding — 
that, in a certain notion, which is indispensable to the 
coherency of our whole experience, indispensable to the 
establishing any nexus between the different parts and 
successions of our whole train of notices, we include an 
accessary notion of necessity, which yet has no justifica- 
tion or warrant, no assignable derivation from any known 
or possible case of human experience. We have one 
idea at least — viz. the idea of causation — which tran- 
scends our possible experience by one important element, 
the element of necessity, that never can have been 
derived from the only source of ideas recognised by the 
philosophy of this day. A Lockian never can find his 
way out of this dilemma. The experience (whether it be 
the experience of sensation or the experience of reflec- 
tion) which he adopts for his master-key, never will 
unlock this case ; for the sum total of human experience, 
collected from all ages, can avail only to tell us what is, 
but never what must he. The idea of necessity is abso- 
lutely transcendent to experience, per se, and must be 
derived from some other source. From what source ? 
Could Hume tell us ? No : he, who had started the 
game so acutely, (for with every allowance for the detec- 
tion made in Thomas Aquinas, of the original suggestion, 
as recorded in the Biographia Liter aria of Coleridge, 



326 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

we must still allow great merit of a secondary kind to 
Hume for his modern revival and restatement of the 
doctrine,) this same acute philosopher broke down con- 
fessedly in his attempt to hunt the game down. His 
solution is worthless, 

Kant, however, having caught the original scent from 
Hume, was more fortunate. He saw, at a glance, that 
here was a test applied to the Lockian philosophy, which 
showed, at the very least, its insufficiency. If it were 
good even for so much as it explained — which Burke is 
disposed to receive as a sufficient warrant for the favora- 
ble reception of a new hypothesis — at any rate, it now 
appeared that there w 7 as something which it could not 
explain. But next, Kant took a large step in advance 
proprio morte. Reflecting upon the one idea adduced by 
Hume, as transcending the ordinary source of ideas, he 
began to ask himself, whether it were likely that this idea 
should stand alone ? Were there not other ideas in the 
same predicament ; other ideas including the same ele- 
ment of necessity, and, therefore, equally disowning the 
parentage assigned by Locke? Upon investigation, he 
found that there were : he found that there were eleven 
others in exactly the same circumstances. The entire 
twelve he denominated categories ; and the mode by 
which he ascertained their number — that there were so 
many and no more — is of itself so remarkable as to 
merit notice in the most superficial sketch. But, in fact, 
this one explanation will put the reader in possession of 
Kant's system, so far as he could understand it without an 
express and toilsome study. With this explanation, there- 
fore, of the famous categories, I shall close my slight 
sketch of the system. Has the reader ever considered 
the meaning of the term Category — a term so ancient 
and so venerable from its connection with the most 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 327 

domineering philosophy that has yet appeared amongst 
men ? The doctrine of the Categories (or, in its Roman 
appellation, of the Predicaments,) is one of the few- 
wrecks from the Peripatetic philosophy which still sur- 
vives as a doctrine taught by public authority in the most 
ancient academic institutions of Europe. It continues to 
form a section in the code of public instruction ; and 
perhaps under favor of a pure accident. For though, 
strictly speaking, a metaphysical speculation, it has always 
been prefixed as a sort of preface to the Organon (or 
logical treatises) of Aristotle, and has thus accidentally 
shared in the immortality conceded to that most perfect 
of human works. Far enough were the Categories from 
meriting such distinction. Kant was well aware of this : 
he was aware that the Aristotelian Categories were a 
useless piece of scholastic lumber : unsound in their first 
conception ; and, though illustrated through long centuries 
by the schoolmen, and by still earlier Grecian philoso- 
phers, never in any one known instance turned to a 
profitable account. Why, then, being aware that even in 
idea they were false, besides being practically unsuitable, 
did Kant adopt or borrow a name laden with this super- 
fetation of reproach — all that is false in theory super- 
added to all that is useless in practice ? He did so for a 
remarkable reason : he felt, according to his own expla- 
nation, that Aristotle had been groping, [the German 
word expressive of his blind procedure is herumtappen,] 
— groping in the dark, but under a semi-conscious instinct 
of truth. Here is a most remarkable case or situation of 
the human intellect, happening alike to individuals and 
to entire generations — in the situation of yearning or 
craving, as it were, for a great idea as yet unknown, but 
dimly and uneasily prefigured. Sometimes the very 
brink, as it may be called, of such an idea is approached : 



328 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

sometimes it is even imperfectly discovered ; but with 
marks in the very midst of its imperfections, which serve 
as indications to a person coming better armed for ascer- 
taining the sub-conscious thought, which had governed 
their tentative motions. As it stands in Aristotle's 
scheme, the idea of a category is a mere lifeless abstrac- 
tion. Rising through a succession of species to genera, 
and from these to still higher genera, you arrive finally at 
a highest genus — a naked abstraction, beyond which no 
further regress is possible. This highest genus, this 
genus general issimum, is, in peripatetic language, a 
category ; and no purpose or use has ever been assigned 
to any one of these categories, of which ten were 
enumerated at first, beyond that of classification — i. e. 
a purpose of mere convenience. Even for as trivial a 
purpose as this, it gave room for suspecting a failure, 
when it was afterwards found that the original ten cate- 
gories did not exhaust the possibilities of the case ; that 
other supplementary categories (post-pr<zdicamenti) be- 
came necessary. And, perhaps, ; more last words ' 
might even yet be added, supplementary supplements, 
and so forth, by a hair-splitting intellect. Failures as 
gross as these, revisals still open to revision, and amend- 
ments calling for amendments, were at once a broad 
confession that here there was no falling in with any 
great law of nature. 

The paths of nature may sometimes be arrived at in a 
tentative way ; but they are broad and determinate ; 
and, when found, vindicate themselves. Still, in all 
this erroneous subtilization, and these abortive efforts, 
Kant perceived a grasping at some real idea — fugitive 
indeed and coy, which had for the present absolutely 
escaped ; but he caught glimpses of it continually in 
the rear ; he felt its necessity to any account of the 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 329 

human understanding that could be satisfactory to one who 
had meditated on Locke's theory as probed and searched 
by Leibnitz. And in this uneasy state — half sceptical, 
half creative, rejecting and substituting, pulling down and 
building up — what was in sum and finally the course 
which he took for bringing his trials and essays to a 
crisis ? He states this himself, somewhere in the Intro- 
duction to his Critik der reinen Vernunft ; and the pas- 
sage is a memorable one. Fifteen years at the least have 
past since I read it; and, therefore, I cannot pretend to 
produce the words, but the substance I shall give ; and I 
appeal to the candor of all his readers, whether they have 
been able to apprehend his meaning. I certainly did not 
for years. But, now that I do, the passage places his pro- 
cedure in a most striking and edifying light. Astron- 
omers, says Kant, had gone on for ages, assuming that the 
earth was the central body of our system ; and insuper- 
able were the difficulties which attended that assumption. 
At length, it occurred to try what would result from in- 
verting the assumption. Let the earth, instead of offering 
a fixed centre for the revolving motions of other heavenly 
bodies, be supposed itself to revolve about some one of 
these, as the sun. That supposition was tried, and grad- 
ually all the phenomena which, before, had been incohe- 
rent, anomalous, or contradictory, began to express 
themselves as parts of a most harmonious system. 
c Something,' he goes on to say, ' analogous to this I have 
practised with regard to the subject of my inquiry — the 
human understanding. All others had sought their central 
principle of the intellectual phenomena out of the under- 
standing, in something external to the mind. I first turned 
my inquiries upon the mind itself. I first applied my ex- 
amination to the very analysis of the understanding.' In 
words, not precisely these, but pretty nearly equivalent to 
22 



330 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

them, does Kant state, by contradistinction, the value, and 
the nature of his own procedure. He first, according to 
his own representation, thought of applying his investiga- 
tion to the mind itself. Here was a passage which for 
years (I may say) continued to stagger and confound me. 
What ! he, Kant, in the latter end of the 18th century, 
about the year 1787 — he the first who had investigated 
the mind I This was not arrogance so much as it was 
insanity. Had he said — I, first, upon just principles, or 
with a fortunate result, investigated the human understand- 
ing, he would have said no more than every fresh theorist 
is bound to suppose, as his preliminary apology for claim- 
ing the attention of a busy world. Indeed, if a writer, on 
any part of knowledge, does not hold himself superior to 
all his predecessors, we are entitled to say — Then, why 
do you presume to trouble us ? It may look like modesty, 
but *s, in effect, downright effrontery for you to think 
yourself no better than other critics ; you were at liberty 
to think so whilst no claimant of public notice — as being 
so, it is most arrogant in vou to be modest. This would 
be the criticism applied justly to a man who, in Kant's 
situation, as the author of a new system, should use a 
language of unseasonable modesty or deprecation. To 
have spoken boldly of himself was a duty ; we could not 
tolerate his doing otherwise. But to speak of himself in 
the exclusive terms I have described, does certainly seem, 
and for years did seem to myself, little short of insanity. 
Of this I am sure that no student of Kant, having the 
passage before him, can have known heretofore what con- 
sistent, what rational interpretation to give it ; and, in 
candor, he ought to own himself my debtor fov the light 
he. will now receive. Yet, so easy is it to imagine, after a 
meaning is once pointed out, and the station given 
from which it shows itself as the meaning — so e; 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 331 

under these circumstances, is it to imagine that one has, 
or that one could have, found it for one's self — that I 
have little expectation of reaping much gratitude for my 
explanation. I say this, not as of much importance one 
way or the other in a single case of the kind, but because 
a general consideration of this nature has sometimes op- 
erated to make me more indifferent or careless as to the 
publication of commentaries on difficult systems, when I 
had found myself able to throw much light on the diffi- 
culties. The very success with which I should have 
accomplished the task — the perfect removal of the 
obstacles in the student's path — were the very grounds of 
my assurance that the service would be little valued. 
For I have found what it was occasionally, in conversa- 
tion, to be too luminous — to have explained, for 
instance, too clearly a dark place in Ricardo. In such a 
case, I have known a man of the very greatest powers, 
mistake the intellectual effort he had put forth to appre- 
hend my elucidation, and to meet it half way, for his own 
unassisted conquest over the difficulties ; and, within an 
hour or two after, I have had, perhaps to stand, as an 
attack upon myself, arguments entirely and recently fur- 
nished by myself. No case is more possible: even to 
apprehend a complex explanation, a man cannot be pas- 
sive ; he must exert considerable energy of mind ; and, in 
the fresh consciousness of this energy, it is the most 
natural mistake in the world for him to feel the argument 
which he has, by considerable effort, appropriated to be an 
argument which he has originated. Kant is the most 
unhappy champion of his own doctrines, the most infe- 
licitous expounder of his own meaning, that has ever 
existed. Neither has any other commentator succeeded 
in throwing a moonlight radiance upon his philosophy. 
Yet certain I am, that, were I, or any man, to disperse all 



332 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

his darkness, exactly in that proportion in which we did 
so — exactly in the proportion in which we smoothed all 
hindrances — exactly in that proportion would it cease to 
be known or felt that there had ever been any hindrances 
to be smoothed. This, however, is digression, to which I 
have been tempted by the interesting nature of the griev- 
ance. In a jesting way, this grievance is obliquely noticed 
in the celebrated couplet — 

1 Had you seen but these roads before they were made, 
You'd lift up your hands and bless Marshal Wade/ 

The pleasant bull here committed conceals a most mel- 
ancholy truth, and one of large extent. Innumerable are 
the services to truth, to justice, or society, which never 
can be adequately valued by those who reap their benefits, 
simply because the transition from the early and bad state 
to the final or improved state cannot be retraced or kept 
alive before the eyes. The record perishes. The last 
point gained is seen ; but the starting point, the point 
from which it was gained, is forgotten. And the traveller 
never can know the true amount of his obligations to 
Marshal Wade, because, though seeing the roads which 
the Marshal has created, he can only guess at those 
which he superseded. Now, returning to this impenetra- 
ble passage of Kant, I will briefly inform the reader that 
he may read it into sense by connecting it with a part of 
Kant's system, from which it is in his own delivery 
entirely dislocated. Going forwards some thirty or forty 
pages, he will find Kant's development of his own 
categories. And, by placing in juxtaposition with that 
development this blind sentence, he will find a reciprocal 
light arising. All philosophers, worthy of that name, 
have found it necessary to allow of some great cardinal 
ideas that transcended all the Lockian origination — ideas 
that were larger in their compass than any possible 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 333 

notices of sense or any reflex notices of the understand- 
ing; and those who have denied such ideas, will be found 
invariably to have supported their denial by a vitium 
subreptionis, and to have deduced their pretended gene- 
alogies of such ideas by means of a petitio principii — 
silently and stealthily putting into some step of their 
leger-de-main process, everything that they would pretend 
to have extracted from it. But, previously to Kant, it is 
certain that all philosophers had left the origin of these 
higher or transcendent ideas unexplained. Whence came 
they? In the systems to which, Locke replies, they had 
been called innate or connate. These were the Carte* 
sian systems. Cudworth, again, who maintained certain 
4 immutable ideas ' of morality, had said nothing about 
their origin ; and Plato had supposed them to be reminis- 
cences from some higher mode of existence. Kant first 
attempted to assign them an origin within the mind itself, 
though not in any Lockian fashion of reflection upon 
sensible impressions. And this is doubtless what he 
means by saying that he first had investigated the mind — 
that is, the first for such a purpose. 

Where, then, is it, in what act or function of the mind, 
that Kant finds the matrix of these transcendent ideas ? 
Simply in the logical forms of the understanding. Every 
power exerts its agency under some laws — that is, in the 
language of Kant, by certain forms. We leap by certain 
laws — viz., of equilibrium, of muscular motion, of gravi- 
tation. We dance by certain laws. So also we reason 
by certain laws. These laws, or formal principles, under 
a particular condition, become the categories. 

Here, then, is a short derivation, in a very few words, 
of those ideas transcending sense, which all philosophy, 
the earliest, has been unable to dispense with, and yet 
none could account for. Thus, for example, every act of 



334 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

reasoning must, in the first place, express itself in distinct 
propositions ; that is, in such as contain a subject, (or 
that concerning which you affirm or deny something,) a 
predicate, (that which you affirm or deny,) and a copula, 
which connects them. These propositions must have 
what is technically called, in logic, a certain quantity, 
or compass, (viz., must be universal, particular, or 
singular ;) and again they must have what is called 
quality, (that is, must be affirmative, or negative, or 
infinite :) and thus arises a ground for certain correspond- 
ing ideas, which are Kant's categories of quantity and 
quality. 

But, to take an illustration more appropriately from the 
very idea which first aroused Kant to the sense of a vast 
hiatus in the received philosophies — the idea of cause, 
which had been thrown as an apple of discord amongst 
the schools, by Hume. How did Kant deduce this ? 
Simply thus : it is a doctrine of universal logic, that there 
are three varieties of syllogism — viz., 1st, Categoric, or 
directly decrlaative, [A is B] ; 2d, Hypothetic, or con- 
ditionally declarative, [If C is D, then A is B] ; 3d, 
Disjunctive, or declarative, by means of a choice which 
exhausts the possible cases, [A is either B, or C, or D ; 
but not C or D ; ergo 2?.] Now, the idea of causation, or, 
in Kant's language, the category of Cause and Effect, is 
deduced immediately, and most naturally, as the reader 
will acknowledge on examination, from the 2d or hypo- 
thetic form of syllogism, when the relation of dependency 
is the same as in the idea of causation, and the neces- 
sary connection a direct type of that which takes place 
between a cause and its effect. 

Thus, then, without going one step further, the reader 
will find grounds enough for reflection and for reverence 
towards Kant in these two great results : 1st, That an 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 335 

order of ideas has been established, which all deep 
philosophy has demanded, even when it could not make 
good its claim. This postulate is fulfilled. 2dly, The 
postulate is fulfilled without mysticism or Platonic reve- 
ries. Ideas, however indispensable to human needs, and 
even to the connection of our thoughts, which came to us 
from nobody knew whence, must for ever have been 
suspicious ; and, as in the memorable instance cited from 
Hume, must have been liable for ever to a question of 
validity. But, deduced as they now are from a matrix 
within our own minds, they cannot reasonably fear any 
assaults of scepticism. 

Here I shall stop. A reader new to these inquiries may 
think all this a trifle. But he who reflects a little, will see 
that, even thus far, and going no step beyond this point, 
the Kantian doctrine of the Categories answers a standing 
question hanging aloft as a challenge to human philoso- 
phy, fills up a lacuna pointed out from the era of Plato. 
It solves a problem which has startled and perplexed every 
age : viz. this — that man is in possession, nay, in the 
hourly exercise, of ideas larger than he can show any title 
to. And in another way, the reader may measure the ex- 
tent of this doctrine, by reflecting that, even so far as now 
stated, it is precisely coextensive with the famous scheme 
of Locke. For what is the capital thesis of that scheme ? 
Simply this — that all necessity for supposing immediate 
impressions made upon our understandings by God, or 
other supernatural, or antenatal, or connatal, agencies, is 
idle and romantic ; for that, upon examining the furniture 
of our minds, nothing will be found there which cannot 
adequately be explained out of our daily experience : and, 
until we find something that cannot be solved by this ex- 
planation, it is childish to go in quest of higher causes. 
Thus says Locke : and his whole work, upon its first plan, 



336 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

is no more than a continual pleading of this single th* 
pursuing it through all the plausible objections. Bein^, 
therefore, as large in its extent as Locke, the reader must 
not complain of the transcendental scheme as too nar: 
even in that limited section of it here brought under his 
notice. 

For the purpose of repelling it, he must do one of two 
things : either he must show that these categories or tran- 
scendent notions are not susceptible of the derivation and 
genesis here assigned to them — that is, from the forms 
of the logos or formal understanding ; or, if content to 
abide by that derivation, he must allege that there are 
other categories besides those enumerated, and unprovided 
with any similar parentage. 

Thus much in reply to him who complains of the doc- 
trine here stated ; as, 1st, Too narrow ; or, *2d, As insuffi- 
ciently established. But, 3d, In reply to him who wishes 
to see it further pursued or applied, I say that the possible 
applications are perhaps infinite. With respect to those 
made by Kant himself, they are chiefly contained in his 
main and elementary work, the Critik der reinen Yer- 
nunft ; and they are of a nature to make any man melan- 
choly. Indeed, let a man consider merely this one notion 
of causation ; let him reflect on its origin ; let him remem- 
ber that, agreeably to this origin, it follows that we have 
no right to view any thing in rerum natard as objectively, 
or in itself a cause ; that when, upon the fullest philo- 
sophic proof, we call A the cause of B, we do in fact only 
subsume A under the notion of a cause ; we invest it with 
that function under that relation, that the whole proceed- 
ing is merely with respect to a human understanding, and 
by way of indispensable nexus to the several parts of our 
experience ; finally, that there is the greatest reason to 
doubt, whether the idea of causation, is at all applicable to 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 337 

any other world than this, or any other than a human 
experience. Let a man meditate but a little on this or 
other aspects of this transcendental philosophy, and he 
will find the steadfast earth itself rocking as it were be- 
neath his feet ; a world about him, which is in some sense 
a world of deception ; and a world before him, which 
seems to promise a world of confusion, or 6 a world not 
realized? All this he might deduce for himself without 
further aid from Kant. However, the particular purposes 
to which Kant applies his philosophy, from the difficulties 
which beset them, are unfitted for anything below a regu- 
lar treatise. Suffice it to say here, that, difficult as these 
speculations are from one or two embarrassing doctrines 
on the Transcendental Consciousness, and depressing as 
they are from their general tendency, they are yet pain- 
fully irritating to the curiosity, and especially so, from a 
sort of experimentum cruets, which they yield in the pro- 
gress of their development on behalf of the entire doctrine 
of Kant — a test which, up to this hour, has offered defi- 
ance to any hostile hand. The test or defiance which I 
speak of, takes the shape of certain antinomies, (so they 
are termed,) severe adamantine arguments, affirmative and 
negative, on two or three celebrated prohlems, with no 
appeal to any possible decision, but one, which involves 
the Kantian doctrines. A qucestio vexata is proposed — 
for instance, the infinite divisibility of matter ; each side 
of this question, thesis and antithesis, is argued : the logic 
is irresistible, the links are perfect, and for each side alter- 
nately there is a verdict, thus terminating in the most 
triumphant reductio ad absurdum — viz. that A, at one 
and the same time and in the same sense, is and is not B, 
from which no escape is available, but through a Kantian 
solution. On any other philosophy, it is demonstrated 
that this opprobrium of the human understanding, this 



338 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

scandal of cannot be removed. This celebrated 

chapter of antinomies has been of great service to the 
mr-re polemics of the transcendental philosophy : it is a 
glove or gage of defiance, constantly lying on the ground, 
challenging the rights of victory and supremacy so long 
as it is not taken up bv anv antagonist, and bringing mat- 
ters to a short decision when it i 

One section, and that the introductory section, of the 
transcendental philosophy, I have purposely omitted, though 
in strictness not to be insulated or dislocated from the 
faithful exposition even of that which I have given. It is 
the doctrine of Space and Time. These profound themes, 
so confounding to the human understanding, are treated 
by Kant under two aspects — 1-t, as Anchauungen. or 
Intuitions — (so the German word is usually translated 
want of a better :) 2d, as forms, a priori, of all our 
other intuitions. Often have I laughed internally at the 
characteristic exposure of Kant's style of thinking — that 

. a man of so much worldly sagacity, could think of 
offering, and of the German scholastic habits, that any 
modern nation could think of accepting such cabalistical 
phrases, such a true and very ; IgnoHmm per Ignotius? 
in part payment of an explanatory account of Time and 
Space. Kant repeats these words — as a charm before 
which all darkness flies ; and he supposes continually the 
of a man denying his explanations or demanding 
proofs of them, never once the sole imaginable case — 
. of all men demanding an explanation of these explan- 
ations. Deny them ! Combat them ! I Mild a man 
deny, why should he combat, what might, for anything to 
the contrary appearing, contain a proi note at two 
month- after date, for 1< : No; it will cost a 
little preliminary work before such explanations will much 
avail any scheme of philosophy, either for the pro or con. 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 339 

And yet I do myself really profess to understand the dark 
words ; and a great service it would be to sound philoso- 
phy amongst us, if this one word anschauung were ade- 
quately unfolded and naturalized (as naturalized it might 
be) in the English philosophic dictionary, by some full 
Grecian equivalent. Strange that no man acquainted 
with German philosophy, should yet have been struck by 
the fact — or, being struck, should not have felt it impor- 
tant to call public attention to the fact of our inevitable 
feebleness in a branch of study, for which, as yet, we 
want the indispensable words. Our feebleness is at once 
argued by this want, and partly caused. Meantime, as 
respects the Kantian way of viewing space, by much the 
most important innovation which it makes upon the old 
doctrines is — that it considers space as a subjective., not 
an objective aliquid ; that is, as having its whole available 
foundation lying ultimately in ourselves, not in any exter- 
nal or alien tenure. This one distinction, as applied to 
space, for ever secures (what nothing else can secure or 
explain) the cogency of geometrical evidence. Whatever 
is true for any determinations of a space originally in- 
cluded in ourselves, must be true for such determinations 
for ever, since they. cannot become objects of conscious- 
ness to us, but in and by that very mode of conceiving 
space, that very form of schematism which originally 
presented us with these determinations of space, or any 
whatever. In the uniformity of our own space-conceiving 
faculty, we have a pledge of the absolute and necessary 
uniformity (or internal agreement among themselves) of 
all future or possible determinations of space ; because 
they could no otherwise become to us conceivable forms 
of space, than by adapting themselves to the known condi- 
tions of our conceiving faculty. Here we have the neces- 
sity which is indispensable to all geometrical demonstration : 



340 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

it is a necessity founded in our human organ, which cannot 
admit or conceive a . unless as preconforming to 

these original forms or schematisms. Whereas, on the 
contrary, if space were something objective, and conse- 
quently being a separate existence, independent of a 
human organ, then it is altogether impossible to find any 
intelligible source of obligation or cogency in the evidence 
— such as is indispensable to the very nature of geomet- 
rical demonstration. Thus we will suppose that a regular 
demonstration has gradually, from step to step downwards, 
through a series of propositions — No. 8 resting upon 7, 
that upon 5, 5 upon 3 — at length reduced you to the ele- 
mentary axiom, that Two straight lines cannot enclo- 
space. Now, if space be subjective originally — that is 
y, founded (as respects us and our geometry) in our- 
es — then it is impossible that two such lines can 
enclose a space, because the possibility of anything what- 
ever, relating to the determinations of space, is exactly 
co-extensive with (and exactly expressed by) our p< 
to conceive it. Being thus able to affirm its impossibility 
universally, we can build a demonstration upon it. But, 
on the other hypothesis, ; -pace being objective, it is im- 
possible to goes ce ire are to draw our proof of the 
alleged inaptitude in two straight lines for enclosing a 
space. The most we could say is, that hitherto no instance 
has been found of an enclosed space circumscribed by two 
straight lines. It would not do to allege our human inabil- 
itv to conceive, or in imagination to draw, such a circum- 
scription. For, besides that such a mode of argument is 
exactlv the one supposed to have been rejected, it is liable 
to this unanswerable objection, so long as space med 
to have an objective existence, viz., that the human inabil- 
ity to conceive such a possibility, only argues (what in 
fact is often found in other cases) that the objective t 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 341 

ence of space — i. e., the existence of space in itself, and 
in its absolute nature — is far larger than its subjective 
existence — i. e., than its mode of existing quoad some 
particular subject. A being more limited than man might 
be so framed as to be unable to conceive curve lines ; but 
this subjective inaptitude for those determinations of space, 
would not affect the objective reality of curves, or even 
their subjective reality for a higher intelligence. Thus, 
on the hypothesis of an objective existence for space, we 
should be thrown upon an ocean of possibilities, without 
a test for saying what was — what was not possible. But, 
on the other hypothesis, having always in the last resort 
what is subjectively possible or impossible, (i. e., what is 
conceivable or not by us, what can or cannot be drawn or 
circumscribed by a human imagination,) we have the 
means of demonstration in our power, by having the ulti- 
mate appeals in our power to a known uniform test — viz., 
a known human faculty. 

This is no trifling matter, and therefore no trifling ad- 
vantage on the side of Kant and his philosophy, to all 
who are acquainted with the disagreeable controversies of 
late years among French geometricians of the first rank, 
and sometimes among British ones, on the question of 
mathematical evidence. Legendre and Professor Leslie 
took part in one such a dispute ; and the temper in which 
it was managed, was worthy of admiration, as contrasted 
with the angry controversies of elder days, if, indeed, it 
did not err in an opposite spirit, by too elaborate and too 
calculating a tone of reciprocal flattery. But, think as we 
may of the discussion in this respect, most assuredly it 
was painful to witness so infirm a philosophy, applied to 
an interest so mighty. The whole aerial superstructure — 
the heaven-aspiring pyramid of geometrical synthesis — 
all tottered under the palsying logic of evidence, to which 



342 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

these celebrated mathematicians appealed. And where- 
fore ? — From the want of any philosophic account of 
space, to which they might have made a common appeal, 
and which might have so far discharged its debt to truth, as 
at least to reconcile its theory with the great outstanding 
phenomena in the most absolute of sciences. Geometry 
is the science of space : therefore, in any philosophy of 
space, geometry is entitled to be peculiarly considered, 
and used as a court of appeal. Geometry has these two 
further claims to distinction — that, 1st, It is the most per- 
fect of the sciences, so far as it has gone ; and, 2dly, 
That it has gone the farthest. A philosophy of space, 
which does not consider and does not reconcile to its own 
doctrines the facts of geometry, which, in the two points 
of beauty and of vast extent, is more like a work of 
nature than of man, is, prima facie, of no value. A phi- 
losophy of space might be false, which should harmonize 
with the facts of geometry — it must be false, if it contra- 
dict them. Of Kant's philosophy it is a capital praise, 
that its very opening section — that section which treats 
the question of space, not only quadrates with the facts 
of geometry, but also, by the subjective character which 
it attributes to space, is the very first philosophic scheme 
which explains and accounts for the cogency of geometri- 
cal evidence. 

These are the two primary merits of the transcendental 
theory — 1st, Its harmony with mathematics, and the fact 
of having first, by its doctrine of space, applied philoso- 
phy to the nature of geometrical evidence ; 2dly, That it 
has filled up, by means of its doctrine of categories, the 
great hiatus in all schemes of the human understanding, 
from Plato downwards. All the rest, with a reserve as to 
the part which concerns the practical reason, (or will,) is 
of more questionable value, and leads to manifold disputes. 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 343 

But I contend, that, had transcendentalism, done no other 
service than that of laying a foundation, sought but not 
found for ages, to the human understanding — namely, by 
showing an intelligible genesis to certain large and indis- 
pensable ideas — it would have claimed the gratitude of 
all profound inquirers. To a reader still disposed to un- 
dervalue Kant's service in this respect, I put one parting 
question — Wherefore he values Locke ? What has lie 
done, even if value is allowed in full to his pretensions ? 
Has the reader asked himself that ? He gave a negative 
solution at the most. He told his reader that certain dis- 
puted ideas were not deduced thus and thus. Kant, on the 
other hand, has given him at the least a, positive solution. 
He teaches him, in the profoundest revelation, by a dis- 
covery in the most absolute sense on record, and the most 
entirely a single act — without parts, or contributions, or 
stages, or preparations from other quarters — that these 
long disputed ideas could not be derived from the experi- 
ence assigned by Locke, inasmuch as they are themselves 
previous conditions under which any experience at all is 
possible : he teaches him that these ideas are not mysti- 
cally originated, but are, in fact, but another phasis of the 
functions, or forms of his own understanding ; and, finally, 
he gives consistency, validity, and a charter of authority, 
to certain modes of nexus, without which the sum total of 
human experience would be a rope of sand. 

In terminating this slight account of the Kantian philoso- 
phy, I may mention that in or about the year 1818-19, 
Lord Grenville. when visiting the lakes of England, ob- 
served to Professor Wilson, that, after five years' study of 
this philosophy, he had not gathered from it one clear 
idea. Wilberforce, about the same time, made the same 
confession to another friend of my own. 



1 



m 



344 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

It is not usual for men to meet with their capital disap- 
pointments in early life, at least not in youth. For, as to 
disappointments in love, which are doubtless the most 
bitter and incapable of comfort, though otherwise likely to 
arise in youth, they are in this way made impossible at a 
very early age, that no man can be in love to the whole 
extent of his capacity, until he is in full possession of all 
his faculties, and with the sense of dignified maturity. A 
perfect love, such as is necessary to the anguish of a per- 
fect disappointment, presumes also for its object, not a 
mere girl, but woman, mature both in person and charac 
ter, and womanly dignity. This sort of disappointment 
in a degree which could carry its impression through life 
I cannot therefore suppose occurring earlier than at twen 
ty-flve or twenty-seven. My disappointment — the pro 
found shock with which I was repelled from German 
philosophy, and which thenceforwards tinged with cyni- 
cal disgust towards man in certain aspects, a temper 
which, originally, I will presume to consider the most 
benign that can ever have been created — occurred when 
I was yet in my twentieth year. In a poem under the 
title of Saul, written many years ago, by Mr. Sothcby, 
and perhaps now forgotten, having never been popular, 
there occurs a passage of some pathos, in which Saul is 
described as keeping, amongst the splendid equipments of 
a royal wardrobe, that particular pastoral habit which he 
had worn in his days of earliest manhood, whilst yet hum- 
ble and undistinguished by honor, but also yet innocent 
and happy. There, also, with the same care, he pre- 
served his shepherd's crook, which, in hands of youthful 
vigor, had been connected with remembrances of heroic 
prowess. These memorials, in after times of trouble or 
perplexity, when the burthen of royalty, its cares, or its 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 345 

feverish temptations, pointed his thoughts backwards, for 
a moment's relief, to scenes of pastoral gaiety and peace, 
the heart-wearied prince would sometimes draw from 
their repository, and in solitude would apostrophize them 
separately, or commune with the bitter-sweet remembran- 
ces which they recalled. In something of the same spirit 
— but with a hatred to the German philosopher, such 
as men are represented as feeling towards the gloomy 
enchanter, Zamiel, or whomsoever, by whose hateful se- 
ductions they have been placed within a circle of malign 
influences — did I at times revert to Kant ; though for me 
his power had been of the very opposite kind ; not an en- 
chanter's, but the power of a disenchanter — and a disen- 
chanter the most profound. As often as I looked into his 
works, I exclaimed in my heart, with the widowed queen 
of Carthage, using her words in an altered application — 

1 Qusesivit lucem — ingemuitque repert&S 

Had the transcendental philosophy corresponded to my 
expectations, and had it left important openings for further 
pursuit, my purpose then was, to have retired, after a few 
years spent in Oxford, to the woods of Lower Canada. I 
had even marked out the situation for a cottage and a con- 
siderable library, about seventeen miles from Quebec. I 
planned nothing so ambitious as a scheme of Pantisocracy. 
My object was simply profound solitude, such as cannot 
now be had in any part of Great Britain — with two ac- 
cessary advantages, also peculiar to countries situated in 
the circumstances and under the climate of Canada : viz., 
the exalting presence in an under-consciousness of forests 
endless and silent, the everlasting sense of living amongst 
forms so ennobling and impressive, together with the 
pleasure attached to natural agencies, such as frost, more 
23 



346 LIFE AND MANNERS. 

powerfully manifested than in English latitudes, and for a 
much longer period. I hope there is nothing fanciful in 
all this. It is certain that, in England, and in all mode- 
rate climates, we are too slightly reminded of nature or 
the focus of nature. Great heats, or great colds, (and in 
Canada there are both,) or great hurricanes, as in the 
West Indian latitudes, recall us continually to the sense of 
a powerful presence, investing our paths on every side ; 
whereas, in England, it is possible to forget that we live 
amongst greater agencies than those of men and human 
institutions. Man, in fact, ' too much man,' as Timon 
complained most reasonably in Athens, was then, and is 
now, our greatest grievance in England. Man is a weed 
everywhere too rank. A strange place must that be with 
us, from which the sight of a hundred men is not before 
us, or the sound of a thousand about us. 

Nevertheless, being in this hotbed of man inevitably for 
some years, no sooner had I dismissed my German philo- 
sophy, than I relaxed a little that spirit of German abstrac- 
tion which it had prompted ; and, though never mixing 
freely with society, I began to look a little abroad. It 
may interest the reader, more than anything else which I 
can record of this period, to recall what I saw within the 
ten first years of the century, that was at all noticeable or 
worthy of remembrance amongst the literati, the philoso- 
phers, or the poets of the time. For, though I am not in 
my academic period from 1S04 to 1808, my knowledge of 
literary men — or men distinguished in some way or other, 
either by their opinions, their accomplishments or their 
position, and the accidents of their lives — began from the 
first year of the century, or, more accurately, from the 
year 1800 ; which, with some difficulty and demurs, and 
with some arguments from the Laureate Pye, the world 



GERMAN LITERATURE. 347 

was at length persuaded to consider the last year of the 
eighteenth century.* 

* Those who look back to the newspapers of 1799 and 1900, will see 
that considerable discussion went on at that time upon the question, 
whether the year 1800 was entitled to open the 19th century, or to close 
the 18th. Mr. Laureate Pye wrote a poem, with a long and argument- 
tative preface on the point. 



THE END, 









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